Completely agree. Backups need to be tested periodically. I remember some years ago the exchange server failed. And of course the backups were no good either. Luckily I had manually backed up the databases a week earlier so I was able to restore the exchange server to that point. The backup staff then spend about 4 days trying to rebuild the backed up databases so that the week of missing data could be restored.
As for the NCM, I do manually copy of the configs from time to time. I must say though, that now with backups to disk, backups have become more "reliable" but as you say, 'assume nothing'.