Run a Postgres restore drill you can actually trust

Introduction

Automate nightly dumps, verify them inside an isolated container, and rehearse the restore path long before an incident writes the script for you.

Field notes

A few patterns we kept seeing while puttering around Infrastructure problems:

• The simple version survived every refactor; the clever version didn’t.
• Documentation written during the work aged far better than documentation written after.
• The second time a problem shows up, it is already a pattern — name it.

A checklist you can steal

• The failure is reproducible with one command.
• The fix has a test that fails without it.
• Someone other than the author has run it on their machine.

Closing

Write the short version future-you will actually read. That is the whole trick.