How do you track what's backed up?

My team recently lost some production data - not because backups failed, but because some critical things weren’t tracked at all.

Postgres dumps -> backed up

GitLab repos -> backed up

Ghost configs -> backed up

Listmonk database -> NOT backed up

Snapshots exist, but they’re heavy and don’t make it clear whether everything important is included. Also, there's the overhead of managing them, policies, etc - which just feels like overkill. Backing up the entire OS and temp files and so on doesn't sit well with me.

Ad-hoc scripts give an illusion of safety -- but practically it’s easy to miss something (we had a bunch of scripts/cron for this stuff).

The hard part isn’t running backups -- it’s visibility: knowing what needs backup, what’s actually covered, and where it lives.

How do you handle this in your organization? What’s the hardest part of tracking backups in practice?