Schedule a monthly restore game-day or your backups will rot quietly

Schedule a monthly restore game-day or your backups will rot quietly
Untested backups decay: formats drift, creds expire, jobs silently break. Ritual:
— Block 90 minutes, same day each month, calendar invite, no skipping
— Restore the FULL stack to a fresh box, not just the DB
— Pick a random old backup, not only the newest, prove retention works
— Log restore time and every step that broke
— Fix one broken step before next month, every time
A backup tested once at setup is a backup that works exactly once. Fight me in the comments.