Backup and Restore

A backup is not a file sitting in object storage — it is a promise that you can get data back in a specific amount of time, and that promise is worthless until it has been tested. Most organizations discover their backup was broken, incomplete, or too slow to restore at the exact moment they can least afford to learn it: during an incident.

The backup job succeeding is the least interesting fact about your backup strategy. The interesting fact is whether a restore, run cold by someone who did not write the backup script, gets the right data back inside the time the business can tolerate losing it.

An untested backup is not a backup — it is an unverified hope that you will find out about during an outage.

1. Derive frequency from RPO, not from habit