[TheAndruu]

> then running programmatic tests against it that you define to make sure they really have what you need

Sounds like the crux will still depend on how well one writes these tests.

Agreeing that no backup is verified until it is restored... one way this can be achieved is use something like Ansible to script the backup of the database, script the restore, and run them and verify everything is backed up / restored properly.

Then since everything is automated, a person can reasonably trust their backups are verified, with the full confidence if they need to do a backup/restore, they just have to run a script.

[lloydpick]

You don't have to run the tests if you don't want, the tool has a different state for when you don't have them "ok_no_test". For some backups we run through Uphold we have written some very basic ones, like looking for the existence of some specific users, or that a table has X number of rows, which are very good for quick sanity tests.