Backups Are Useless Until You Restore Them

0. A Backup Is Not a File, but a Promise You can write anything you want in the logs: backup completed successfully WAL uploaded successfully retention completed successfully archive is healthy But on the day of a real disaster, PostgreSQL will not read your beautiful logs. It will simply ask for the next WAL file. And if you cannot provide it, the whole story ends right there. This article is not about the internal implementation of a WAL receiver . There was already a separate long story about