Recently, I decommissioned the infrastructure behind Scholent , a multi-tenant Laravel SaaS application I built.

Deleting the infrastructure itself was easy.

The more important question was:

If I needed Scholent again six months or two years from now, could I actually recover it?

I didn't want the answer to be:

I have a backup somewhere.

I wanted evidence that the critical recovery material was intact and, particularly for the database, actually restorable.

So I treated this less as a server deletion exercise and more as a small disaster-recovery exercise.

The process eventually looked like this:

Inventory ↓ Archive ↓ Encrypt ↓ Transfer off-server ↓ Verify integrity ↓ Restore independently ↓ Inspect recovered data ↓ Document reconstruction ↓ Decommission infrastructure

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The distinction between having a backup and having tested recovery material became the most important part of the exercise.

Note: Commands in this article have been sanitised where…