hardScenarioDesignMidSeniorStaff
Your team says the database is backed up nightly. How would you establish whether you could really restore it?
5 min readUpdated 2026-08-15Target archetype: Big Tech, Enterprise Captive, Product Startup
Answer
Short answer
A backup job that exits zero is a belief, not a control. Establishing recoverability means agreeing an RPO and RTO, then rehearsing a restore onto clean infrastructure, measuring how long it took and verifying the result — including everything the dump does not contain.
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Likely follow-ups
- The primary is corrupt and you have WAL archives. Walk me through the recovery, and what you do before you touch anything.
- What does a delayed replica protect you from that a nightly dump does not, and what does it miss?
- WAL archiving has been failing for six hours and nobody noticed. What is happening on the primary right now?
- Someone dropped one table an hour ago. How do you get it back without rolling the whole database backwards?
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