It’s not like I wasn’t aware that it’s wise to manually verify that your backups are good before restoring them, but I was hasty and learned a hard lesson when I discovered that the automated database backups for my hosting account stopped working properly a little over 2 years ago. :'(

The good news is I was able to recreate the lost posts and the automated backups appear to be working properly now (though I’ll be examining them closely the next few days to be sure).