Yes, the confusion is I wasn't referring to the .enc AC backup. Ironically, it is pretty solid. I have found 95% of its main purpose is to restore Amazing Charts after an INSTALL. There is a way to test it, but you are correct, you would never want to restore it to your production AC.
In fact, there is never really a good reason to test any backup to a production environment. James is talking about restoring to a test server. Many of the 3rd party backup programs allow one to restore a bare metal backup to another computer with different hardware.
I was referring mostly to 3rd party software such as Veeam or Altaro or Acronis backing up Virtual Machines. You can restore to a different area and most of them have test environments which mimic your network environment.
I have three backups. All of them are restored to a non-production computer or to the setup the backup software creates.
Veeam even has SureBackup, where it creates a backup and tests it with certain scripts, checks it, verifies files and can even do a complete antivirus on it. You can spin it up and browse it and run programs, etc.
