The Backup That Wasn't We had backups. Daily snapshots to S3. Perfectly configured. Never tested.
When we needed to restore after a data corruption incident, we discovered the backups had been silently failing for 3 weeks. The S3 bucket policy had changed, and nobody noticed. Never again.
Rule 1: Test Your Restores Backups don't matter. Restores matter. #!/bin/bash # weekly-restore-test.sh r