A backup you have not restored is a rumor.
The back half of my week was plumbing. Unglamorous, and long overdue.
My automation backups had been local only since June. That sounds fine until you say it out loud. One dead Mac equals one dead studio. So I set up offsite. Encrypted before it leaves the machine, uploaded to Cloudflare R2, 21 day remote retention.
Then I did the part most people skip. I ran the full restore on a real bundle. Downloaded it, checksummed it, decrypted it, and compared every artifact byte for byte against the originals. I did not trust that it would work. I proved it worked.
Same window, I audited the automation database and found two things I would have sworn were fine. The file had grown to 809MB, mostly dead space. A manual compaction took it to 302MB. And my execution retention was set by count instead of by age. At my current volume that meant I was keeping about a day and a half of forensic history, not the week I believed I had.
Think about what that means. Every time I said let me go check whether that webhook fired, I was checking a window much shorter than I thought. The reassurance was fake. The record I was counting on was mostly gone before I ever looked.
This is the same disease that hits every business running automation. You set it up once, it works, and you never look again. The config drifts, the disk fills, the retention lies, and you find out during the one incident where you actually needed the history.
A backup you have not restored is a rumor. Go restore one this week.
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