Backup plugins are for people who've never needed restores

Hot take backup plugins are for people who have never needed restores and I will die on this hill so listen up I have been running websites since 2009 when I started with a little joomla site for my cat breeding business and I remember the first time I needed a restore it was tuesday morning I had just eaten two pieces of toast with apricot jam and my cat Mr whiskers was sitting on the printer because it was warm and the weather was overcast with a chance of rain later and I thought I had backups every night with that plugin everyone recommends the one with the blue icon and guess what the restore failed completely corrupted zip and I lost three years of photos not the cat photos I had those on my phone but the customer order history and tax records and everything so now I test my restores monthly on a separate machine I built from spare parts I got from my nephew who fixes computers and people who just back up and never test are fooling themselves it is like buying a fire extinguisher and never checking the gauge and my neighbor did that actually and his garage burned down but that is another story the point is I spent six hours last month doing a full restore test and I document every step in a spreadsheet and anyone who says backups alone are enough has never been through the fire

Monthly? I test weekly. Lost a client in 2019 to a backup that "looked fine" until we needed it. Verify your restores. Bit rot, silent corruption, plugin updates breaking archive compatibility—your backup is only as good as your last successful restore. I keep three generations on cold storage, two on warm, test one randomly each week. Paranoid? Ask the guy who thought his nightly automated backup was "probably fine" until ransomware hit and his "backup" was 400KB of header garbage. That was me. That was Tuesday.