Rohanthetechguy23

Aug 9, 2026

A backup you have never restored is not a backup

We had nightly database dumps running for two years. Green ticks in the dashboard, files in object storage, everything looked fine. Then we needed one. The dumps were being written with a flag that excluded large object data, and nobody had ever tried loading one into an empty database to check. What we do now, and I would recommend to anyone: • A scheduled job restores last night's dump into a throwaway database. • It counts rows per table and compares them against the source. • It runs one real query the application uses, and fails loudly if the result is wrong. It takes about four minutes a night. The first time we ran it, it failed — which is exactly the point. If you take one thing from this: the question is not "do we have backups". It is "when did we last restore one".