I have 24 users and zero of them have deployed. If one of them deploys tomorrow and their server dies on Thursday, the only thing standing between them and a lost week is a backup I have never opened.

That sentence bothered me enough to change how I think about backups. Here is where I landed.

Everyone has a backup job. Almost nobody has a restore.

Ask a room of developers whether their database is backed up and most hands go up. Ask how many have restored one of those backups, start to finish, and the hands mostly come down.

A backup job that exits with code 0 tells you a file was written. It does not tell you the file is complete, that it matches the schema you are running today, or that it will load on a fresh machine at 2am. Until you have restored it, you are trusting a file you have never opened.…