Do you trust your host's backups?

Mano, I learned the hard way. My VPS he crashed last week, I go to my host panel, click "restore from backup" and GUESS WHAT

The "backup" is just weekly snapshot from Sunday. My data from Monday-Saturday? POOF. Gone. Caramba!

I thought my host he was doing daily backups, mano. The sales page said "automated backups included" but nobody said it was just one snapshot per week. Nossa, I was so angry.

So now I run my own

restic

restic check

Do you actually verify your backups or you just trust the panel checkbox?

[Poll]
- I verify restores monthly
- I check files exist but never restore-test
- I trust my host 100%
- What backups? Kkkkk

Caramba mano, that is not a backup, that is a lottery ticket! Kkkkk

I don't not verify nothing, I'm ashamed now. My host he says "daily backup" but I never checked if it ain't just empty files or corrupted. Nossa, what if I need it tomorrow?

Gonna start doing test restores to a cheap VPS from RackNerd, can't hurt nobody. I used https://www.racknerd.com for that. Thanks for the wake up call, CarlosBilby

I used to trust the Panel Checkbox, yes? Then the Hetzner incident of 2023 happened, and now I have the Verification Cron.

Every Sunday at 3AM my server he does a test Restore to a temporary VM, checks the Database, then destroys it. I get an email with « SUCCESS » or « FAILURE ». The Random Words in the subject line help me filter.

Costs me maybe 2€ of compute per month. For that peace of mind, yes, it is nothing.

Hey folks, Marcus from InterServer here

We saw this thread and honestly? You got us. We were doing snapshots, calling them "backups," same trap. Super stoked to admit we were wrong

New policy as of today: every backup gets a monthly restore-test. If it fails, you get account credit. We're gonna publish the success rate on our status page.

Took us 48 hours to build the pipeline. Shoulda done it years ago. Thanks @CarlosBilby for the kick