No. You don't make a daily task of testing backups. That would be wrong for precisely the reasons you cite. It's a waste of effort and time, and ignores what

No. You don't make a daily task of testing backups. That would be wrong for precisely the reasons you cite. It's a waste of effort and time, and ignores what the point of testing them is for: ensuring that the procedure still works. One would only actually test the backups about twice a year just to be damn sure they are still resulting in restorable data. The rest of the year it's only worth keeping an automated process reporting whether or not the things are being made, and people keeping an eye on change management to be sure no changes are made to the known-to-be working process that can break it without the new process incurring an explicit vetting cycle. Gitlab wasn't apparently testing or engaging in monitoring what was supposed to be an automated process. That's where they got burned. Process monitoring may be boring as hell, but it's seldom wasted effort, and will prevent massive, compounded headaches from bringing operations to a chaotic halt.