Backups nobody has restored: the silent risk
A backup that has never been restored is not a backup: it is a hope. How to prove in one afternoon that your copies work.
- Estratos Engineering
- 1 min read
Almost every customer who arrives with a serious incident had backups. What they did not have was evidence that those backups worked. Backing up is half the job; a proven restore is the other half.
Why restores fail
- The backup had been failing for weeks and nobody read the error email.
- The virtual machine was backed up, but not a consistent database.
- The encryption keys lived on the same server that was lost.
- The restore takes three days and the operation only survives eight hours.
How it is really tested
Restore into a separate environment, start the service and verify that the data is complete and usable. Every test should leave a record: what was restored, how long it took and what failed.
The goal nobody writes down
Before choosing a tool, agree two numbers with the business: how much data can be lost (RPO) and how long it can be offline (RTO). Without those numbers, any design is a bet.
What you can do this week
Pick one critical system, restore it in a test environment and time it. What you learn in that afternoon is worth more than any compliance report.
