Quality of Backup and Restore

[richlittle]

I am using mysql administrator to perform scheduled daily backups of my
employee database.

What guarantee do I have after doing a restore that everything has
restored correctly?

My boss want wants a log of the number of employees in the database to
be created at backup time (eg: 4388). Then after restore we should
manually check that the number of employees in the database is the same
(= 4388) to give us confidence that everything is back as it was. I
believe this approach sounds terribly antiquated (back from the days of
mainframes) but without something better what confidence do we have?

In any case the backup is automated in mysql administor so how could I
create this log of the number of employees at backup time? I don't see
how I could.

As a less important question my boss also wants scheduled backups at
12pm and 5pm daily but mysql administator only supports one per day I
understand. Any ideas?

Thanks
Rich