Almost everyone has backups. Far fewer people have ever restored from them. Until you do, a backup is only a hope with a schedule attached.
The monthly drill
- Pick a random file from last night's backup.
- Restore it somewhere harmless, never over the original.
- Compare checksums with the live copy.
- Write the date and the result into your log.
It takes five minutes. Over the years this small ritual has caught silent failures that would otherwise have surfaced on the worst possible day: a full disk, an expired credential, a path that quietly stopped being included.
Make restoring boring
The point is not the ritual itself. The point is that restoring becomes familiar, so that on the day it really matters you are following steps you already know instead of reading documentation in a panic.
Daniel RenInfrastructure at Bet on Future
Looks after small servers and writes down everything that broke along the way.
