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Verifying just the integrity of the backup archive itself means really nothing. You can have a perfectly valid backup archive which misses a lot of files because they were unreadable, therefore this is not a good way to test the backup. The best way to test a backup is trying to perform a test restoration on a local or development web server. This is something which can not be performed automatically in a generalized manner.

My standard recommendation —as you can see in the Quick Start Guide— is to install a copy of Zend Server Community Edition with PHP 5.2 on your local machine and try a test restoration of your backup archive. You don't have to do that all the time, though. It's adequate to do that at least every time you upgrade anything on your site (Akeeba Backup itself, the Joomla! core, an extension) or when your host upgrades Apache, MySQL or PHP. You may also want to do a test restoration once a month to make sure that you are familiar with the procedure in case of an emergency.

Testing the backup is the same thing as restoring it. First, create a directory in your server's root, for example name it "test". Place your backup archive in there. Then download Kickstart from our Download section, extract the ZIP archive and place the extracted files (kickstart.php and all of the .ini files) alongside the archive. Then, all you have to do is to access Kickstart as http://localhost/test/kickstart.php. The only thing you have to take care of is supplying the local database's connection details in the Restore DB step of the restoration process.

The outline of the procedure is included in our Quick Start Guide and in our video tutorials.

Regarding the Kickstart error, how did you download the archive file? If you used the download links in the component, it's highly probable that the archive became corrupted during transfer. In this case, follow the third video tutorial's steps to download the backup archive using FTP in Binary transfer mode. Anything else is not guaranteed to work, due to potential issues with server configuration, third party Joomla! extensions or the usual suspect for causing Internet havoc (goes by the name Internet Explorer).

If all else fails, you can also try using Akeeba eXtract Wizard (free download from our Download section) to extract the archive instead of using Kickstart. After doing that and moving all extracted files to your local server's subdirectory, you can still access the restoration script as http://localhost/yourdirectory/installation/index.php. When the restoration is over, do as the restoration script prompts you and remove the installation directory (it was included in the files you copied).

At this point, I strongly suggest you to read our Quick Start Guide during your first site restoration. It will slow you down having to read it, but -trust me- will save you from lots of trouble. All the tricks and quirks I am aware of are written in there.

Regarding your other question, yes, you have to supply your local database's connection information. If you leave your live servers information, one of two things will happen:
1. Most likely, the restoration of the database will fail with a connection error.
2. On very rare cases, it might corrupt your live site's database. This can only happen if your live host doesn't use "localhost" as the database host name and the on-line database server allows remote connection to it. The chance of this happening is extremely small, but it's worth noting it.