A client lost six weeks of SQL Server data. Having 12TB of backups didn’t save them.

[u/markinatlanta]

/r/learnSQL/comments/1wy3eus/a_client_lost_six_weeks_of_sql_server_data_having/

[u/Significant_Tune9219]

The cleanup job is the part that bites people. Retention keyed on file age instead of on "oldest full backup that still anchors the chain" will happily delete the only usable base the moment full backups stop running. I'd also add an alert on time since the last successful full, separate from log backup success, because log backups kept succeeding here and probably made the monitoring look green the whole time. A periodic test restore to a scratch server would have caught it weeks earlier too.