Testing Your Restores
A backup you can't restore is useless.
A Backup You Cannot Restore Is Worthless
Many teams invest time setting up automated backups but never verify whether those backups can actually be used to recover data. A backup that fails during restore is no backup at all.
This lesson walks through the discipline of restore testing: how to verify your backups work before a real disaster forces you to find out the hard way.
What Does a Restore Test Involve?
A restore test involves taking a backup file and loading it into a database — typically a separate test instance — then querying that database to confirm the data is complete and consistent.
The steps are: 1) Obtain the backup file. 2) Restore it to a sandbox environment. 3) Run validation queries. 4) Compare results against production.
All lessons in this course
- Logical vs Physical Backups
- Point-in-Time Recovery
- Testing Your Restores
- Disaster Recovery Planning