NewestArchiveTime counted an aborted PBS upload (1 byte, no manifest, NEWEST)
as a successful backup, so the tier reported fresh, went not-due, and was never
retried. On the real 168h offsite cadence that is 7 days of silence, and neither
the R-88 breaker (defers only DUE tiers) nor the hub deadline monitor (reads the
same freshness) can catch it.
R-84's storage-as-ground-truth was right; the bug is that presence was taken for
validity. Now only plausibly-complete entries count, via a measured size floor
(minPlausibleArchiveBytes = 1 MiB). Undecidable => not counted.
Size is the only tier-agnostic discriminator: verification and encrypted are
absent on EVERY local dir archive (and on a good PBS snapshot until verify-new
catches up), so gating on either would reject 100% of local backups and cause
fleet-wide backup thrash. Floor measured against the fleet: smallest real backup
is 612,397,450 B, so 1 MiB leaves 584x headroom — asserted by a test.
Rejections are announced at WARN once per distinct volid, naming snapshot and
reason; per-poll logging would emit ~288 lines/day and bury the signal.
Four red-proofs, all observed failing.
