2026-09-14
A backup you have never restored is only a hope. Once a month I pick a random directory, restore it to a scratch disk and compare checksums with the original.
restic restore latest --target /mnt/scratch --include /home/photos/2024 cd /mnt/scratch/home/photos/2024 && sha256sum -c ~/photos-2024.sha256
The second check is age: if the newest snapshot is older than two days, something upstream has silently stopped. A one-line cron job sends a message when that happens.
The third is space. Pruning keeps 7 daily, 4 weekly and 12 monthly snapshots, and the repository size is logged so a sudden jump stands out.