A coworker of mine used to say "It's not the backup, it's the restore." Meaning your backup process isn't meaningful unless you have a tested and effective means for recreating your system from that backup. It has stuck with me.
Finding out that your backup consists of a perfectly backed up empty database isn't much fun!
E.g. a team adjacent to mine years ago had a dev who made a one-character typo in a commit that went to production. Which caused many $MM to incorrectly flow out the door post-haste. The bad transactions were fortunately reversible with some work, but I was floored that there were no automated tests gating these changes. It wasn't a subtle problem. The most basic, boring integration test of "run a set of X transactions, check the expected sum" would have prevented that failure.
Wish I learned that.
Tried some closed source iTunes Backup fixer, didn't work.
Pretty heated right now, but oh well, what can I do? I guess I'll just have to start over. Thankfully I am a iCloud Photo Library subscriber.
So yes, can confirm, "It's not the backup, it's the restore."
Though, we were required to keep good backups. 3 sets of tapes.. 1 always in the tape drive, 1 always in a fire-proof bomb-resistant bunker, and one sometimes in transit to or from the bunker.
Our manager was paying some obscene sum for this backup service, so I suggested we just hide one of the daily backup zip files and pretend we deleted it. The head of the group humored my request. It turned out that nobody was monitoring the tape or the backup job. The tape had filled up and nobody had swapped tapes and called the bunker courier.
Luckily, they at least used PVCS for configuration management of the releases. No source control for development, but every time we cut a release of the software, the head office sent over no fewer than 3 people to literally watch over our poor release guy's shoulder as he zipped up the source, built the binaries, checked both into PVCS, and burned two CDs of binaries and source.
Defense industry... things you're required to do get done in triplicate. Things you're not required to do, but cost no money and significantly reduce risk, take approvals from 5 different people 9 levels above you. I guess how often the backup tape needed to be checked for available space was insufficiently specified.
On a side note, at that client I also once sat quietly in a meeting for 30 minutes watching two grown men argue over if my use of "will" in a design document needed to be changed to "shall". I didn't care, and right away said I was fine changing the word to "shall", but the second reviewer was adamantly opposed to unnecessary changes.
I tried to avoid argument because it didn't matter, not because I thought my word choice was incorrect. It was an internal document describing intended software behavior, to help the poor soul who had to maintain that code.
"When 'shall' is used to describe a status, to describe future actions, or to seemingly impose an obligation on an inanimate object, it's being used incorrectly."[0]
[0]https://law.utexas.edu/faculty/wschiess/legalwriting/2005/05...
Formerly critical tool (now, sole repository of necessary historical information) that runs only on an outdated stack and for "copy protection" has critical data in an undocumented, obfuscated DAT file. It also requires a parallel port dongle, which it checks for as part of every read operation. The vendor went bust a decade before I was ever hired.
I've automated a 'backup to zip file' each time the application terminates. It's saved me more than once - it's easy to clobber the data in the thing and the users have a tendency to screw it up when trying to navigate its cryptic keystroke-driven interface.
Trying to export all the legacy data into a new tool met with incredibly frustration the couple of times we tried. It all becomes irrelevant in late 2017 and there's been a new system in place since 2007, so this abomination needs to only live on for a little while longer.
That's obviously not the right solution for many IT-centric backup needs, but when full-disk backup became cheap and easy it set a new standard in how I think about backup and restore process everywhere.
We were very lucky that I caught it.