Don't consider it a backup until you've successfully restored the data from it.

The first thing I do after setting up a new data backup is test a restore of the data. Only after that will I feel confident that the backup procedure works right.

In the article author's case, an attempt to restore would have caught the problem of the missing .env files and the large movie files.

As for the Ctrl-C on both the backup and restore, you should check your I/O (network and disk) before terminating a process. Doing that would have confirmed that the process was still going, and indicate the rate at which the process was going.

spsesk117

+1. `strace` can be very helpful here, to see if a process is stuck waiting on something or whether it's just zooming along with no output.

dspillett

`progress` (https://github.com/Xfennec/progress) and similar can be very helpful too depending on the backup utilities being used (in my case often involving rsync) even if the processes normally have everything set to quiet so no progress information is automatically forthcoming.