How to validate a backup

Dear all,

During a scheduled backup procedure, how can I be sure that a backup is correct?
I used to work with Oracle Databases. With Oracle, we used to check size of files to determine the backup is valid or not. If the size of backup files were smaller than the actual size, we found out that we should run the backup procedure again.
As I know so far, the best solution for this issue is restoring the whole backup and running ‘table checks’ but restoring and checking tables take a lot of time. Is there any other solution to solve this problem without restoring?