alt Hacker Newsi saw your now dead comment about how no one you interviewed had an answer…
just it’s surprising to me that devops folk aren’t in an org that has backup software, cause this kind of testing is standard load out for most backup softwares, and they even solve the space and isolation issue with various instant restore / publishing capabilities where data from the backup is mounted directly to some staging server with postgres or whatever installed in an isolated area
not trying to knock the idea you are correct most ppl don’t test their backups, but it’s a bit strange no one you talked to used any of the most common backup softwares
definitely in favor of free solutions as backup software field is awful like many ent tech fields, but like the workflows do exist
One person I talked to had Veeam SureBackup running and still built a separate check for the database. As I know SureBackup proved the VM boots, but it doesn't know or care if your orders table has the right row count, or if a sequence is broken. That needs a tool that actually understand the specific platform or data, like Postgres, not only the underlying VM. Also a lot of people I talked to were never use Veeam or Commvault, since they run Postgres on RDS, Supabase, or a simple VM. And even where the tooling exists, it's usually a separate infra tam running it, not the people who actually own this one database, so it never gets wired up for this specific check anyway. This tool is more for people whose stack never had such a thing, or it's there and nobody's actually using it for this.