>When we went to look for the pg_dump backups we found out they were not there. The S3 bucket was empty, and there was no recent backup to be found anywhere. Upon closer inspection we found out that the backup procedure was using pg_dump 9.2, while our database is running PostgreSQL 9.6 (for Postgres, 9.x releases are considered major). A difference in major versions results in pg_dump producing an error, terminating the backup procedure.

Yikes. One common practice that would have avoided this is by using the just taken backup to populate stage. If the restore fails pages go out. If integration tests that run after a successful restore/populate fail- pages go out.

Live and learn I guess.