# The Restore You Have Never Run

> A backup you have never restored is untested. Restore one on a schedule and time it.

Source: https://christwentyfour.com/blog/the-restore-you-have-never-run

A backup you have never restored is untested. It is usually wrong in some small way. This failure is silent. A broken pipeline announces itself. A broken backup sits there, green, for years.

## What goes wrong

- The backup finished but is empty or partial, because a permission changed.
- The restore works, but it takes eleven hours, and everyone expects one.
- The restore runs but has no users, grants, or extensions, and nobody knows the manual steps.
- The backup key lives inside the system you are trying to recover.

## Drill it

Restore something on a schedule and time it. Not a checksum. A real restore into a usable state, done by someone following the written steps. Quarterly is enough. Track how long it took, how many steps were missing, and whether the result passed a real check.

## Know your two numbers

For each important system, agree two numbers with the business owner. How much data you can lose sets backup frequency. How long you can be down sets the restore approach. Hourly backups with a twelve-hour restore do not fit together.

## Test the boring failure

The likely disaster is a delete in the wrong environment, or a bug that corrupts data for a week. Then the latest backup is bad too. Know whether you have point-in-time recovery before you need it.