alt Hacker News"Obviously, none of this is worth anything if you don’t actually test restores."
One of my teachers claimed that contrary to common behavior, no one actually valued backups; it was restores that were worth paying for.
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It is a special sensation when you go to your hand rolled backup "solution" to make some simple recoveries and start finding problems. It is a complex mix of not dread but disgust, sick to your stomach, self-anger, and loss. I can only image what that's like with like all of your children's baby pictures being the lost material. Borg and restic are fantastic, it still seems like some sort of dummy proof mode might be desirable, all the features in the world and they have some some reasonably sane policy or something that includes verifications.
On the flip side of that though, really and truly, I've restored a laptop from a timemachine backup and it came back damn nearly identical and that was magical.
Try running a business on that basis - where do the restores come from? 8)
We charge our customers for backup storage by volume and that includes an annual demonstration of recovery. We fire up some or all of their systems on our gear in isolation and show that they are reasonably functional.
Your teacher's comment is riffing on the well trod lines of: "heights don't kill people, it's depths that kill people", which is all about perspective. This is is not related to "guns don't kill people ..." which is about agency.