Everything was fine until the backups were needed

Had a server setup that ran quietly for months. No major alerts, no noticeable downtime, nothing that seemed concerning.

Then a storage issue hit unexpectedly.

At first, it didn’t feel catastrophic because backups existed. Everyone relaxed a little once that was confirmed.

The problem was that nobody had tested the restore process in a long time.

Some backups were incomplete, others outdated, and restoring everything took far longer than expected. The systems eventually came back, but the stressful part wasn’t the failure itself — it was realizing the “safety net” wasn’t as reliable as assumed.

Since then, backup testing became just as important as backups themselves.