# REPORT — F-CRIT-2 fixed: a failed backup no longer looks like a fresh one (2026-07-28)

Scope: `felhom-agent` v0.105.0 → **v0.106.0**. Docs here. Implementation detail and the full live
re-test live in `felhom-agent/REPORT.md`; the campaign that found it is
`documentation/audits/CAMPAIGN-8-backup-restore-2026-07-27.md`.

## What changed
`NewestArchiveTime` counted an aborted PBS upload (1 byte, manifest-less, and NEWEST) as a
successful backup, so the tier read fresh, went **not due**, and was never retried — seven days of
silence on the real 168h cadence, invisible to both the R-88 breaker (defers only *due* tiers) and
the hub deadline monitor (reads the same freshness). It now counts only *plausibly complete*
entries via a measured 1 MiB floor; 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 — gating on either
would have rejected 100% of local backups and produced fleet-wide backup thrash. That inverse risk
is a first-class test, red-proofed by making the filter reject everything.

## Verified live, not just in unit tests
Campaign fault 2 was replayed against the fixed agent on demo-hp — phantom created, rejected and
announced once; the tier correctly reported DUE and backed up (4,359,968,099 B landed); and the
inverse showed **no thrash**, with 91 scheduler ticks as the positive observable that the loop was
alive rather than dead.

## Settled along the way — no retention bug
Server-side prune does **not** count phantoms toward `keep-last`: a dry-run against three real
snapshots plus a phantom retained two real ones plus the phantom. The feared "two phantoms ⇒ zero
real backups" does not occur. Prune never removes them either, so they accumulate one per aborted
upload — filed as **R-99** (LOW, hygiene), not as a retention bug.

## Docs touched
- `documentation/backlog/OPEN-ITEMS.md` — F-CRIT-2 → SHIPPED+PROVEN-LIVE; **R-99** filed;
  **F-CRIT-1** filed as READY-HIGHEST (Campaign 8's other HIGH finding, untouched here).
- `documentation/audits/CAMPAIGN-8-backup-restore-2026-07-27.md` — F-CRIT-2 row struck through and
  a closing section added.

## Still open, highest first
**F-CRIT-1** — an app that fails to restart after a quiesce never alarms, for two independent
reasons. Then fault 4 (restic transport interruption), which this fix makes more pointed: the
phantom question is now answered for PBS and still open for restic.
