Testing Your Backups
Untested backups are not backups. Restoration drills, automated verification, and building confidence.
There's a phrase that every database administrator has tattooed on their brain: "Untested backups are not backups." You can run pg_dump every night for five years, dutifully storing files in S3, feeling confident that your data is protected. Then the day comes when you actually need to restore, and you discover that the backup files have been empty since a configuration change eight months ago.
This isn't a hypothetical. It's one of the most common disaster recovery failures in the industry. The backup process ran. The files were created. The monitoring showed green. But nobody ever tried to restore from those files.
Testing backups isn't paranoia. It's the only way to actually have backups.
What Backup Testing Actually Means
Testing a backup means completing the full restora
This lesson is part of the Guild Member curriculum. Plans start at $29/mo.