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One of the nicest ways I've experienced of making sure your backups are good is to sync up your development machine with them occasionally. Obviously there are situations like HIPAA where you can't do that, but if you can, do. You'll catch problems with your backups long before you actually need to use them.

This. Sometime last century I had to restore an old codebase from a tape backup. Step one find the correct drive...

We'll never need that old repo again.

IMO data loss is less a symptom of untested backups than it is of developer-managed systems. I wonder if ycombinator has a sysadmin (who isn't also a developer)?