I wonder what kind of backups the hosting company was doing. I've done so many backups in my years of data center administration and have learned the patterns of what fails and the effect. When compressed tapes fail, everything after the point of failure is lost. I no longer trust that technology.
My current backup technology of choice is a gauntlet of external hard drives and file system replication. Since I use Linux, I can do my replication with rsync. If I only need a limited amount of archival history, I do what is called "hard linked tree" replication. That's good for about 30 points of time. Any more than that and a versioning system like Subversion or Mercurial gets all the history needed, but at the cost of having to run a database and increased exposure to failures having widescale impact. If course if any of those hard drives dies, you lose all that data. That's why I keep multiple copies. I don't know what tools are good to do the same with Windows. But the backup machine and the server being backed up really need to be the same OS class (Windows vs. BSD/Linux/Unix).
