I got tired of trusting my backups, so I built something to stop lying to myself about it

The Problem

Every backup tool I've ever used tells you the same thing when it finishes: success. You get a green checkmark, an exit code of 0, and the job is done. What none of them tell you is whether you could genuinely recover your data if you needed to.

I looked into this because it kept bothering me. It turns out I wasn't being paranoid.

The Data

A 2026 disaster recovery survey found that 82 percent of setups have automated restore testing set to never. People are running restic, Borg, Kopia, Duplicati, and other tools. They watch the cron job report success every night only to discover that the backup was worthless the one time it really mattered. There are entire forum threads full of people experiencing that moment.

The Solution

So I built Vestal. It’s like a dead man's switch for backup jobs, similar to Healthchecks.io if you've used that for cron monitoring. Instead of asking "did the job run" it asks "did the job run AND can I prove the data restores?"

How It Works

An agent runs alongside whatever backup tool you’re already using. It performs a real integrity check and, on a slower schedule, it pulls a sample file back and checksums it against the original. If that ping doesn’t show up as scheduled, or if it fails, you get an alert right away and not the day you are trying to recover something.

Licensing and Hosting

It's AGPL, so you can self-host the whole thing for free, forever. It’s just one Cloudflare Worker and a database, which costs nothing on the free tier. There’s also a hosted version at vestalapp.com if you don’t want to manage your own setup. That version is also free, with some paid features for those who want more, like ransomware detection.

I'm genuinely curious if anyone else here has experienced this exact problem.

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