[gorgoiler]

You’re right, but also I know I have enough backed up to survive a catastrophe. What I don’t want to do is to test my backup in a non catastrophe situation and invalidate all my TOTP, WhatsApp history, mail settings etc. just because I wanted to test disaster recovery.

It feels like buying a fire safe (phone and app backups) without any kind of understanding if it works then burning your house down to see if it works. I want a fire safe (phone and app backups) that is up-front with guarantees it works!

I should have said this by the way: for a long time I did wipe my phone when crossing borders, learning the hard way all the little details that don’t quite work properly when doing a restore from backups.

[Izikiel43]

> What I don’t want to do is to test my backup in a non catastrophe situation

Isn't that actually one of the things you want to do to validate the backup process?

Better to figure out in a non disaster scenario where you have alternatives.

[fragmede]

Analogies only go so far. Going to the store, buying gasoline and rags and a lighter and then committing arson and burning my house down is maybe a little bit different from sitting down for a few hours with my laptop connected to my phone.

[IncandescentGas]

Right! Backup planning is not black magic. And neither is testing icloud backups.

It's quite easy to restore an icloud backup to a different phone or even ipad for testing purposes, if one were reliant on icloud to hold their data.