Why I built RestoreCtl and what I learned talking to DevOps teams

Before writing a single line of code I spent weeks talking to DevOps engineers and SREs about how they actually handle backup restore testing.

The pattern I kept hearing:

Backups run nightly. Green checkmarks everywhere. But when I asked "when did you last actually restore one into a clean environment and verify that backups are working?" — the answer was almost always "a few months ago" or "a year ago" or even "we don't do that"

One engineer told me their restores had been silently failing for months while the backup job showed green the whole time.

They only found out during a DR drill.

That's what RestoreCtl solves. It automatically runs restore drills against your existing backups, validates data integrity cryptographically, measures your real RTO, and generates a signed report that can help in compliance.

No control plane. No agent. Runs entirely inside your own infrastructure.

Two questions for this community:

1. Have you ever had a backup that looked fine but failed on restore?

2. What would make you trust or distrust a tool like this in your infrastructure?

Genuinely want the honest feedback.