Testing backups or at least monitoring them for correctness is a huge deal and it's problem I myself fudged up on one occasion, right around the holiday season

Testing backups or at least monitoring them for correctness is a huge deal and it's problem I myself fudged up on one occasion, right around the holiday season which was terrible. I've since setup wal-e with daily base backups deleting things older than a week along with the nightly pg_dump's along with a hot stanby. Maybe thats overkill, but after having lost data once. Never again! The nice part about doing wal archiving like barman or wal-e do is you can do more than just backup/restore. You can do it with some time target in mind as well. Someone somehow do a massive update or delete or insert millions+ in garbage? No worries, stop, destroy, restore to a previous point in time, continue onwards. A bug in postgres or the kernel or the filesystem or any other multi-million line codebase in that stack screw up? Most likely the WAL segments are good up to a point still. Hot standby gets you potentially sub-minute failovers if you automate them, or short enough to be ok even with manual failovers. WAL archiving gets you another whole level of safety net that is hard to beat.