Your backup isn't a backup until you've tested the restore

Описание и применение

Резервное копирование без проверки восстановления не гарантирует доступность данных. Ежемесячный тест восстановления с помощью restic подтверждает целостность репозитория, работоспособность пароля и возможность извлечения файлов, а также предоставляет доказательства для аудита.

Задача

Backups can appear successful but may fail when actually needed because the restore process is never tested.

Результат

Monthly restore tests turned a promise of backup into proven recoverability, reducing risk of data loss and providing audit evidence.

Рабочий процесс

• 1. Run restic check to verify repository consistency.
• 2. Execute restic -r /mnt/backups/repo restore latest --target /tmp/restore-test to pull the latest snapshot into a temporary directory.
• 3. Diff the restored directory against the live source (e.g., diff -r /tmp/restore-test /live/source).
• 4. Verify file counts and sizes match.
• 5. Delete the temporary directory and log the outcome.

Доказательства

Once a month, I restore something real from a snapshot. Not to a test directory I'll delete — to a path I actually compare against the source.

Источник

Run restic check first to confirm the repo is internally consistent, because a repo that's silently corrupt will still list snapshots happily.

Источник

The whole thing takes five minutes. The point isn't drama — it's that the skill and the credentials both still work.

Источник