PostgreSQL Restore Failures: It Wasn’t pgBackRest, It Was My Recovery Logic

I was building and testing a PostgreSQL backup and restore workflow using pgBackRest. The idea was simple: take backups restore them automatically validate the database make recovery predictable Instead, I ended up repeatedly breaking PostgreSQL recovery itself. At one point, PostgreSQL refused to start entirely, the application depending on it failed to start, and I started seeing errors like: invalid checkpoint record could not locate a valid checkpoint record at 0/DEAD Later, I also hit timel