kodebeat / papers / platform
Proving the backup restores, nightly, with nobody watching
A scheduled restore-and-smoke-test harness.
Fetches a backup, restores it into a throwaway container on an isolated network with no external egress, runs the smoke queries you declared and compares each result against its expectation. It exits non-zero when a check fails, so a cron job turns we think the backups work into a dated log of restores that completed. The claim it makes possible is narrow and defensible.
What is in it
- The problem — what goes unanswered without it, and who notices first.
- Why the obvious alternative falls short — stated plainly, including where it is the better choice.
- How it works — the method, not a feature list.
- Concrete use cases — with console output quoted from the repository, never reconstructed.
- The methodology behind any number it emits — every term shown, so the figure survives a question.
- What it deliberately does not do — the section most papers leave out.
Part of the Platform & SRE theme.
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