At a startup I worked at, the VP of Engineering was brilliant. He was probably the smartest person I've ever worked for, and the most hard working. He was online almost all hours of the day, working. He also insisted on a 9-to-5 schedule for all the engineers, because he believed that killing your engineers with work was not a scalable way to build a team. He was great.
But the first month I was there, I kept pressing him on what our disaster recovery plan was. His answers were weak at best. It was never tested, and he only had broad ideas of how much time it would take for a full recovery. I don't understand his reticence for testing full disaster recovery, but as everyone knows, unless you have tested DR, you don't have DR.
It was very scary, but in the several years I was there, we never had the database go down hard and lose data. But that was more blind luck than anything else. If we had a data outage, it would have probably been worse than the Gitlab's outage by far.
Maybe in his own cocky way, his disaster recovery plan was to be smart enough to never have a disaster. The problem with this approach is that it only works for a small company, and many people figure out the hard way that smarts don't scale.
Or maybe it was a small startup where him and the poster were the only tech guys and they struggled to performs all the tasks to be done, not limited to backup and DR.
But the first month I was there, I kept pressing him on what our disaster recovery plan was. His answers were weak at best. It was never tested, and he only had broad ideas of how much time it would take for a full recovery. I don't understand his reticence for testing full disaster recovery, but as everyone knows, unless you have tested DR, you don't have DR.
It was very scary, but in the several years I was there, we never had the database go down hard and lose data. But that was more blind luck than anything else. If we had a data outage, it would have probably been worse than the Gitlab's outage by far.