A backup that has never been restored is a guess. Many founders find out during an emergency.
Reply with:
- What you back up: database, uploaded files, configuration
- How often, and where the copies live
- How long you keep them
- Whether you have done a real restore, and how long it took
- What went wrong the first time you tried
Problems people commonly discover on a first restore:
- The backups had been failing silently for weeks.
- The backup was on the same server that died.
- The database was covered, but the uploaded files were not.
- Nobody had the decryption key.
- The restore took hours longer than expected.
- The newest backup was a day old, and a day of orders was gone.
A reasonable minimum: automatic daily backups, a copy with a different provider, an alert when one fails, and a restore test every few months on a spare machine.
If you have never tried a restore, this week is a good time. Post the result.