A backup you have not restored is a guess

14 Sep 2026

For a long time my backup check was looking at the size of the archive. If the number looked about right, I moved on. That tells you a file exists and very little else.

Now I restore into a throwaway directory once a month and run three checks:

• The newest file in the restore is as recent as it should be.
• A database dump loads into a scratch instance without errors.
• A row I know changed last week shows the new value.

The whole thing takes ten minutes. It has caught one real problem so far: an exclude pattern that had been silently skipping a directory since the day I wrote it.

The other habit worth keeping is storing a copy on a machine that shares nothing with the original. Same provider and same region means the same bad day.