Ask most IT teams whether they have backups and the answer is a confident yes. Ask when they last restored one to a clean machine, timed it, and verified the application actually worked on top of it — and the room goes quiet. A backup that has never been restored is not a backup; it is a hope with a cron job.
The failure modes are mundane. Retention scripts silently delete more than intended. A schema change makes old dumps incompatible with the restore procedure. Credentials for the offsite storage expired months ago. None of these produce an error you will notice on a good day; all of them produce a catastrophe on the worst day.
The fix is a quarterly restore drill: pick a random recent backup, restore it to an isolated environment, point a test instance of your application at it, and time the whole exercise against your recovery time objective. Write down the result, including the failures — especially the failures. The first drill is usually humbling; by the third, restores are boring. Boring is exactly what you want your disaster recovery to be.
If you cannot state your RTO and RPO in minutes, or your last verified restore is older than your last major schema change, that is the single highest-leverage thing to fix in your data infrastructure this quarter.
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