Every team says they have backups. Fewer can say they've restored one. The gap between 'we back up nightly' and 'we can recover' is the restore drill, and it's the part nobody schedules.
The drill is simple: take the latest dump, restore it to a scratch machine, and open the app. Time it. If it takes more than an afternoon, the runbook is wrong, fix it while nothing is on fire.
Schedule it quarterly, put it on the calendar, and treat a failed drill like a failed backup. The drill is the plan; the backup is the material.
