# A backup you never restore is a story

> Every audit asks the same question and gets the same pause: when did you last restore it? The drill is the backup.

The setup below is the boring version that has survived real incidents — automated copies, off-site storage, and a calendar entry that actually runs the restore.

## Automate the copy, delete the ritual

Nightly dumps and weekly snapshots that run on a timer survive; procedures that depend on a person remembering do not. If the backup needs a human, it will eventually not happen on the night it matters.

## One copy must live somewhere else

A backup on the same host or the same provider account dies in the same incident. One off-site copy — different provider, different credentials — is the difference between an outage and a company event.

## Schedule the restore, not just the backup

A quarterly calendar entry: pick a copy, restore it to a scratch environment, open the app, check one real record. The first time this takes an afternoon; by the third time it takes twenty minutes.

## What to take away

- Automate backups; manual rituals fail silently.
- Keep one copy off-site under different credentials.
- Test-restore quarterly; time it and write it down.
- Encrypt the dump — a backup is the whole database.

## Tags

Ops, Backup, Postgres, Recovery

## We build this for clients

https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/services/full-stack

## More from the lab

- https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/lab/monitoring-runbook.md — Monitoring that pages someone, not the dashboard
- https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/lab/custom-software-cost.md — What custom software actually costs
- https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/lab/custom-vs-off-the-shelf.md — Custom software or off the shelf — the honest test
- https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/lab/first-90-days-retainer.md — The first ninety days of a retainer, as it actually goes

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Source: https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/lab/backup-restore-drill
DField Solutions — Dunakeszi, Hungary — dezso@dfieldsolutions.com
Booking: see https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/contact