Do your restores actually work? What we found auditing N clusters
Draft·
Outline only. Every number, cluster count and finding below is a
placeholder — replace with real audit results before publishing, and set the
headline’s N to the actual sample
size. This page is noindex until then.
The setup
To write: why we started running audits, and what we were actually measuring. Establish the distinction the whole post turns on — a backup job reporting success versus a restore completing and being verified.
Placeholders to fill:
N— number of clusters/accounts audited.- Time window the audits ran over.
- How environments were sourced, and what that selection biases toward. Say it plainly; a self-selected sample of teams who agreed to an audit is not a random sample of the industry.
- What counted as "recoverable" for the purposes of the write-up.
Method
To write: the actual procedure — read-only scan, then a real test-restore into an isolated environment, then teardown. Name what was asserted (volume mounts, filesystem clean, database accepts a connection, workloads reach ready) so a reader can reproduce or dispute it.
What we found
To write. Do not populate this section until the numbers exist.
| Finding | Frequency | Notes | | --- | --- | --- | | placeholder | n/N | — | | placeholder | n/N | — | | placeholder | n/N | — |
The failure modes worth a subsection each, if the data supports them:
- Cluster state nobody was capturing at all.
- Database backups predating the last schema migration.
- Volume snapshots that had never been mounted.
- Retention that looked long in policy and was short in practice.
- Restores that completed but took far longer than the documented RTO.
Why "green" is the wrong signal
To write: the argument section. A backup job reports on whether the job ran, not on whether the artifact it produced can be used. Keep this short — the findings should carry the point, not the prose.
What we would change tomorrow
To write: two or three concrete, vendor-neutral recommendations a reader can act on today without buying anything. This section earns the right to mention DrillProof at all.
Want this run against your own environment? The free Restore-Assurance Audit is the same procedure described above.