Platform & DevOps·Running it: capacity, failure and recovery
you restore the backup into a scratch environment on a schedule, because a backup nobody has restored is a hypothesis.
Restore testing
Also calledbackup testing, restore drill, recovery rehearsal
Regularly performing a real restore from backups and verifying the result, rather than trusting that the backup job exited zero. It routinely uncovers backups of the wrong database, encrypted backups whose key is gone, restores that take far longer than the objective, and permissions that only exist in the environment being replaced. It is the single highest-value reliability exercise available and the most commonly skipped.