Do not trust your Time Machine backups

I had a very unpleasant surprise yesterday : I found out the hard way that I could not trust my Time Machine backup...

Once booted in recvoery mode to select "Restore TimeMachine backup", the process starts and seem to happily finish a few hours later (surprisingly, it finished when actuall 3 hours of restoration are indicated). No error message, just a confident statement that backup is restored and the computer will reboot in 10 seconds.

Thing is, well, the computer wouldn't boot... I just got a black screen right after the Apple logo, no mouse pointer, just a plain black (backlighted) screen on my MacBook Pro.

I know my way in the system, I'm pretty technical, so I decided to not give up, after a few hours playing around with recovery boot, terminal sessions and log file reading, it appeared that a lot of files were missing, especially system files.

As an example : most content in /usr/share/shadbox, but also ll /System/Library/CoreServices/logind and other files.

After copying these files either from a very old Time Machine backup from end January or from another computer, I finally manage to boot the system.

Lots of applications ar not usable because of missing contents (AppStore, Disk Utility, etc, etc)...

This is totally unacceptable, I work in the computer storage industry, our customers would burn us down to the ground if they could not rely on their storage.

What's worse ? Looks like there is no way to check a backup. Apple provides a "Verify Backup" option in the Time Machine menu, but it is only valid for network backup, not local disks.

Thing is, I was happily looking at my backups every hours, running without errors, througout many many days, only to realize when I need it that it is corrupted.

What do people do when they need reliable backup, except for paying big buck to company who actually care ?