You have backups for everything and have never restored one. Design the system that proves they work.

An untested backup is a belief, not a control. The design that matters is the one that restores automatically on a schedule and verifies the result, because that is the only thing that produces a recovery time you can quote.

Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in researched DevOps, SRE and platform engineering interview loops, written to a senior-engineer editorial bar, and never padded to hit a word count.