If you’ve never tested your backups, you’re not backing up — you’re gambling.
We recently worked with a client on a full restore test. Production-grade, zero shortcuts. Everything should have worked.
Spoiler: it didn’t. But that disaster weekend? It turned out to be one of their smartest moves.
🫣 The Mirage of “It’s All Backed Up”
Meet DataDevils. Daily snapshots? Check. S3 buckets? Check. Cron jobs humming along? Check.
On paper, it looked perfect.
But when a failed DB upgrade forced a restore, they hit a wall. Fast. Half the MySQL tables were gone — excluded by a single typo in the backup config. Critical config files? Also missing. And no one noticed... until it was too late.
The fallout? A week of scrambling, $200K lost, and a team that stopped trusting their own systems.
💥 The Weekend That Got Real
Months later, they ran a no-nonsense restore drill. A full recovery simulation — as if the entire platform had been wiped.
Not just can we find the files? But:
- Can we run the process end-to-end?
- Are the scripts any good?
- Does anyone even know the steps?
The results weren’t pretty.
They wrote a Kubernetes job to pull from S3. Looked fine at first. But the MySQL rehydration? Broken again. Tables missing. Checks too shallow. No checklist.
Here’s the Bash script they used to check for backups:
#!/bin/bash
BUCKET_NAME="my-backup-bucket"
DATE=$(date +%Y%m%d)
BACKUP_DIR="backups/$DATE"
mkdir -p $BACKUP_DIR
aws s3 sync s3://$BUCKET_NAME/ $BACKUP_DIR/
if [[ $(find $BACKUP_DIR -type f | wc -l) -eq 0 ]]; then
echo "Backup failed: No backup files found!"
exit 1
fi
echo "Backup integrity check passed. Found $(find $BACKUP_DIR -type f | wc -l) files."
Looks decent. But it only checked file count — not completeness. Not structure. Not context.
🧠 From Panic to Playbook
That weekend was a turning point.
They rebuilt their backup setup using Terraform, added versioning, validation, and rotation. The works.
resource "aws_s3_bucket" "backup" {
bucket = "my-backup-bucket"
}
resource "aws_s3_bucket_versioning" "versioned" {
bucket = aws_s3_bucket.backup.id
enabled = true
}
resource "aws_lambda_function" "backup_function" {
function_name = "backup_lambda"
handler = "index.handler"
runtime = "nodejs12.x"
s3_bucket = aws_s3_bucket.backup.bucket
s3_key = "lambda.zip"
}
They baked dry runs into CI/CD. Wrote proper restore runbooks. And made drills part of the team routine — just like fire alarms.
The next time an outage hit? They restored everything in 6 hours. Not 6 days.
🧾 Hard-Learned Lessons
- A backup isn’t real until it’s restored.
- Checking file presence isn’t enough. Check completeness.
- Don’t trust memory. Write the damn runbook.
- CI should test your recovery path, not just infra state.
- Don’t wait for a fire to test the extinguisher.
You can hope your backups work. Or you can know. Only one of those pays off when everything’s on fire.