admin
db38f4c800
gates / gates (push) Successful in 17s
R-434 CLOSED — and the row's own "blocked on R-433" verdict was wrong, which is the point.
The fix is a DELETION, not a replacement: withdraw the promise instead of swapping it for a
new one, and the sentence is true under every possible answer to the provider questions, so
it never needs a second rewrite. A replacement would have been blocked; a withdrawal is not.
was: "...still hold the older copy, so this is recoverable file-by-file; it is NOT
confirmed data loss. Check whether a deletion ran on the box before restoring."
now: "...still hold the older copy. The route back out of them is not yet established,
so treat this as neither confirmed data loss nor confirmed recovery. Get in touch
before restoring anything, and check whether a deletion ran on the box."
It must not swing the other way either: "your backups are gone" is still usually false.
Clause (a) — the box cannot WRITE into the snapshot area — stands and is re-confirmed.
Tests: offsite_r434_test.go, three, all driving the production path so they assert the
sentence an operator RECEIVES. ASCII-only fragments, positive and negative controls.
RED-PROOF: restoring the v0.111.0 sentence failed all three, on every fragment, with the
offending sentence printed. TestR431_FiresOnAMassDeletion asserted "NOT confirmed data
loss" and caught this fix correctly; its wording fragment is REMOVED rather than updated,
so the wording keeps ONE home.
R-435 written into the detector's own documentation, no threshold changed: it sees a mass
deletion, not one app being wiped (69 across 9 apps -> ~35 needed, one tag is ~9, and
forget --prune groups by host,tags). Says explicitly not to lower the numbers.
THE STOPPING LINE, in all three places — register, 07 section 8 head, STATUS.md.
Deferred set ENUMERATED, not described: 07 section 8 rows 4, 8, 9, 10, 11 (+11b), 12,
each tagged [BETA-DEFERRED]. A number in the brief was wrong and is corrected in place:
six rows are DEFERRED, ELEVEN carry a blank RTO (4,5,8,9,10,11,11b,12,13,14,15); the other
five are blank for reasons that are not deferred work, and row 15 is an open DEFECT (R-104)
that the stopping line does NOT cover. NO STATUS MOVED — nothing was proven today.
Two provider questions drafted, not sent, no API called (11-D stands):
documentation/runbooks/provider-questions-2026-09-01.md, linked from R-95 and R-433, and
tracked by a dated DUE-CHECKS row (2026-09-15) — the 2026-07-27 check that sat unconfirmed
for 36 days is the scar that block exists for.
R-95, R-433 BLOCKED-ON-PROVIDER. R-95's one-day demotion on a clause that did not hold is
recorded; the proposal to rank it back near the top is stated and NOT acted on. R-430 marked
LATENT with its trigger: it becomes live the moment delete is withdrawn, so it is a
precondition on the R-95 build, not a follow-up. The stale ranking paragraph ("armed",
"zero snapshots") is corrected in place, order unchanged.
Register 621 -> 688 lines; 181 rows throughout; open-state 170 -> 169.
No controller or agent change. No golden owed, no floor change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LB8FmJaGd2cyjvy6dbEjpM
261 lines
20 KiB
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261 lines
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# STATUS — what works, what's broken, what's next
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**Updated 2026-09-01 (third pass) — the backup work is FINISHED for beta, and I have written down
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where it stops. One alarm that was telling you something untrue is fixed and live (hub 0.111.1).
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ONE THING is waiting on you: two short e-mails to Hetzner, drafted and ready to paste.**
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**Earlier 2026-08-31 — I measured whether the box could test its own remote restore without you,
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then built the narrow version you picked. The measurement is why it is 3 seconds a night and
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not an evening's work.**
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> **A view, not a source.** `documentation/backlog/OPEN-ITEMS.md` is the authority; this page restates
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> part of it in plain words, and **nothing may exist only here**. **Items, not paragraphs. One screen.**
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> If it does not fit, it belongs in the register instead.
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## Waiting on you
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*This section is allowed to be longer than one screen, and each item says what happens if you do
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nothing.*
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1. **One thing is waiting on you — item 4 (send two e-mails).** Item 5's alarm mail can now be ignored for good. Otherwise: Both problems the overnight test found are fixed and proven on
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the real machines:
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- the background job that could delete a live restore's lock now waits its turn — and the check
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that finds the next one like it is a test, not a comment, so it cannot come back quietly;
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- the nightly backup check now runs on `demo-felhom`. It said **pass** there this morning, on a
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machine where it could not start at all yesterday.
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The golden carrying both is baked, vouched, and the floor is raised. `demo-felhom` picked it up
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**by itself in about 20 seconds**.
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2. **Whether to keep the test app `bentopdf` on `demo-hp`.** I deployed it last night because it
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is the ONLY app of our 53 with neither a database nor stored files — which makes it the only
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way to prove the new check does not cry wolf on an app that legitimately has nothing. It
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passed silently, which is what we needed to see. **My pick: keep it**, as a permanent control.
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**If you do nothing:** it stays, using almost no space. Say the word and I remove it.
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3. **Nothing else about this release.** Everything in 0.232.0 ships in the controller image plus
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two register lines in the hub (already live). No customer action, no data migration, no
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credential change.
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4. **Please send two short e-mails to Hetzner. They are written for you.**
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`felhom.eu/documentation/runbooks/provider-questions-2026-09-01.md` — open it, copy, send. No
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password or key is in that file, and none should be added.
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**Why.** Yesterday I told you the snapshots make a wiped backup survivable: lose about a day, copy
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the rest back file by file. **The first half is still true. The second half is not, and I found
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that out by trying it.** I tried **777,600** snapshot names on the storage, over nine days, in
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Hetzner's own naming style. **None of them opened.** Then I found why: your data and the snapshot
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door sit on **two different drives** inside the storage, and the door for your data **does not
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exist at all**. So there is no way in from the machines.
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**What is still true, and it matters:** a machine that wipes its own backup **still cannot touch
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the snapshots of it**. The older copy is there. What we do not have is a way to reach it.
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**The two questions.** One: can the **main** account pull single files out of a snapshot? Two: on
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one of Hetzner's own tools, is a "cannot delete" switch forced by them, or chosen by the machine?
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**The second one could remove the whole problem** — no new hardware, no moving anyone's data.
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**If you do nothing:** we cannot finish this. The backups keep working and keep being checked; we
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simply cannot say what a wiped backup costs, and I would then put this risk back near the top of
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your list. **My pick: send both. It is five minutes and it decides an evening's work.**
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5. **You will have received an alarm email from me today about `demo-hp` losing 65 backups. It is a
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test and nothing is wrong.** I built the new "someone deleted the backups" alarm and had to fire it
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once for real to prove it reaches you. Subject: `[Felhom] 🔴 demo-hp: offsite_snapshots_dropped`.
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**No backups were deleted.** **If you do nothing:** nothing — but please do not act on that one
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mail. **Closed now:** that was the only such mail, it was a test, and the alarm's wording has since
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been corrected (item under *Decided* below). Nothing further is needed from you here.
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6. **Whether to change the hub password** (R-350). I printed it into my own session log on 20 August.
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Not in git, not in any saved file — in the log on this machine. **If you do nothing:** it stays as
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it is, at the risk you accept by leaving it. I can change it without ever showing you the new one.
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7. **`demo-hp`'s network setup does not match our own notes** (R-338) — the machine works, the page is
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wrong, or the other way round. **If you do nothing:** the page keeps misleading the next session,
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as it misled one by an hour.
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## Decided — and what would reopen each
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- **THE BACKUP AND RESTORE WORK IS FINISHED FOR BETA. DECIDED 2026-09-01.**
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**What is done, and proven on the real machines:** everything **you or a customer** does alone —
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getting deleted files back, getting an app's data back, getting a whole app back, and losing a
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drive. The restore tells you what it put back, refuses if there is no room, will not accept a
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half-copy, and puts your own data back if it fails.
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**What is parked until after beta:** everything **only I do, with you** — rebuilding a machine as
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itself, losing a whole box, recovering from ransomware, restoring the hub, and losing Hetzner.
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**Six of these have never been timed, and the hub has never been restored.** They are written down,
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they are real, and **none of them stops a beta customer.**
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**Reopens if:** something a customer does for themselves turns out to be broken; **or** Hetzner's
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two answers change what the snapshots are worth; **or** a real customer's data is at stake in one
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of the parked items.
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- **The alarm that promised too much: FIXED and live (hub 0.111.1). DECIDED 2026-09-01.**
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Yesterday's alarm mail said a deleted backup was *"recoverable file-by-file"*. **We now know it is
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not.** I removed the promise rather than writing a new one, so the sentence stays true whatever
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Hetzner answers. It no longer says the data is lost either — that is still usually untrue.
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**Reopens if:** Hetzner's answers give us a real route back; then the alarm can name it.
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- **The missing-golden warning is now pointed at the people who can act on it (R-404). DECIDED
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2026-09-01, and built the same day.** The warning was aimed at the wrong repository: the one where
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a release actually happens never checked at all, while the one that only holds documents was
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refused on every push — including the push that RECORDS a golden bake, which is the very act that
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clears the warning. So the check was blocking its own cure, and we had skipped it thirteen times.
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**What changed:** the release repository now prints a reminder the moment a release is committed
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(it never blocks — you cannot bake a golden for a version you have not pushed yet), and the
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documents repository still runs the check on every push and still says so loudly, but only refuses
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a push that touches real code. **Every other check still blocks everything, always.** Nothing was
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silenced and no product code changed. **Reopens if:** a release ever ships without a golden and
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nobody noticed — that would mean the reminder is not reaching anyone, and the answer would be to
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make the release repository refuse rather than remind.
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- **Getting old backups back yourself: NOT BUILT, deliberately.** **Reopens if:** a real customer
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asks. *(R-312)*
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- **The unopenable old copy on `demo-felhom`: KEPT as a test fixture** — the only state in existence
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where a set-aside store is present and cannot be opened. **Delete when:** that work ships or is
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abandoned. *(R-313)*
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- **A machine in two kinds of trouble says both things: LEFT AS IT IS.** **Reopens if:** observed
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outside a constructed test. *(R-303)*
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## What works
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Both demo machines are home, healthy and reporting — agent **0.130.0** published and running on both.
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**Which controller each box runs, and where the floor sits, is item 1 above and is not restated here** —
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R-395: this paragraph carried a second copy of those numbers, it went stale by seven releases, and the
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page then disagreed with itself about the thing an operator checks first. Ask the hub (`/hosts`,
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`/configs`) or the box for what is live; a doc is never the authority on a version.
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Off-site is credentialed on `demo-hp` and its store opens with the machine's own key.
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**The fleet, because two summaries have been misread:** five customer records, three machines.
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`demo-felhom` and `demo-hp` are ours and disposable; `drill-r50` is a nested drill VM, reverted and
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off. **`peti-felhom` is a real machine we have not heard from since 15 July** and has no host record.
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**`tester-1` is a record with no machine.**
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## Shipped
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- **Something finally checks that the off-site copies are still there and readable** (R-359 + R-397,
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controller 0.227.1, proven on `demo-hp`). Until today **nothing did** — not the box, not the agent.
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The whole-machine backups had their own checks; the copies holding your customers' documents and
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photos had none, so we would have found a problem at restore time, with a customer waiting.
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Now the box checks its own off-site store about once a week and tells you only if something is
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wrong. **A pass sends no e-mail, on purpose** — a weekly "everything is fine" is how people stop
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reading their alerts. **It also catches itself up:** it asks „has it been more than seven days?",
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not „is it Sunday?", so a machine that was switched off on its check day is checked the next day.
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**And it never gets in the backup's way** — if a backup or restore is running, the check steps aside
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and tries again tomorrow. That is not politeness: the tool would otherwise clear a lock that a live
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backup was holding. Proven live, twice over — a real check against your real store (35 seconds), and
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a second check fired during the first, which correctly stepped aside without doing anything.
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**Read item 2 under „Waiting on you" for what this check does NOT see.**
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- **The product stopped claiming a check it never ran.** The monitoring page said an integrity check
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ran every Sunday. It did not exist. The e-mail text, the settings checkbox, the hub's side of it and
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a debug button were all built and wired to nothing (R-397). They now have the missing piece.
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- **Taking the safety copy no longer destroys the app's own backup** (R-361, controller 0.221.1,
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proven on `demo-hp`). Before every restore the machine saves a copy of your live database. To do
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that it called the ordinary backup routine — **which always writes to the app's normal backup
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filename first** — so the app's real backup was overwritten and then renamed away. Until the next
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nightly run the app had **no database backup of its own**, and a local recovery in that window would
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have told you the app never had a database. A comment in the code said this could not happen; it
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could, and had been happening for four months. Proven fixed the only way it can be: the app's own
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backup file is now **byte-identical before and after a restore**, on both database types.
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- **A failed database restore now puts your data back by itself** (R-379/R-380, controller 0.220.2,
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proven on `demo-hp`). Until today, if a restore of an app's database went wrong, the machine had
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already taken a copy of your live database — a good copy — and **nothing in the product could put it
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back.** You were shown a filename. On one of the two database types it was worse: part of the
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restore applied, part did not, and **the dashboard said the app was healthy**. Now the machine puts
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your own copy back automatically and says plainly: the restore failed, your data is as it was, the
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app is running. Proven on both database types, byte-identical both times.
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**If even that fails**, the app is deliberately **stopped and held** rather than started — a running
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app on a half-written database lets you type into it and makes the damage permanent — and you are
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told to contact us. That was your ruling this morning. **Two things also stopped:** the error no
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longer pastes raw database text at you (it was 615 bytes once, including rows out of your own
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database), and the undo copies no longer pile up forever — three per app, and they were being copied
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off-site permanently.
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- **An empty package can no longer wipe out a good one** (R-403, controller 0.230.0). Yesterday we
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wrote this down as *suspected* and said plainly it had not been tested. **We tested it first, and it
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was real.** On a demo machine, on yesterday's build: an app's copy on the second drive went from
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**120 MB — four database backups and three data archives — to 7 KB, nothing left**, in a single
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nightly run, and the run reported success. The cause was that the nightly job only asked *does the
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folder exist* before copying over it, and an empty package is a folder that exists.
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Now the nightly job refuses to replace a **complete** package with an **empty** one. It keeps what it
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has, says so on the app's own backup page, and carries on with everything else. Proven on the same
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machine, in the same state: **all seven files still there, byte for byte.**
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Two more things came with it. The page no longer calls that copy fresh when the run did not refresh
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it — it names the real date of the package instead. And after a restore from the second drive, the
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first drive's package is filled back in immediately, so the empty state that started all this cannot
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happen again. A copy that legitimately gets smaller still gets smaller; only the one dangerous case
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is fenced.
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- **The copy on the second drive can now bring an app back** (R-102 + R-103, controller 0.229.0,
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proven on `demo-hp`, **and delivered** — golden 0.229.0 is vouched and the fleet floor is raised, so
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a machine installed today has it). Every night the box copied each app's whole recovery package onto the second
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drive — its settings, its database and its data. It did that for months. **Nothing could open those
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copies.** No button, no screen, no command. That mattered most in the one fault the second drive
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exists for: if the first drive dies, the package on it dies too, and the copy that survived could
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not be read. For **45** of the 53 apps that is everything they own.
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Now the same restore that always worked from the first drive can read the copy on the second one,
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and the button is on the app's own backup row. **Proved with the first drive's package taken away:**
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Docmost came back in 29 seconds — its database, all three data volumes, a file with a Hungarian
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accented name back byte for byte, and the app then read its own rows with its own password. Done
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again with the app's password file also taken away: the copy carried the passwords too (2 of 2).
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The screen that used to say „press that other button on another page" now offers the action itself.
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It says plainly that **this one overwrites** what is there — the gentle „Fájlok visszaállítása"
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beside it still only adds back missing files — and it names the date of the copy, so nobody puts
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last week over today by accident.
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- **We counted the apps this affects, and settled it.** Two of our own notes disagreed — 43 or 45.
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The answer is **45**, counted with the product's own rule against the live catalogue. The older
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count missed **radarr and sonarr**.
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- **The off-site restore now works for the other 40 apps** (R-356, controller 0.219.0, proven on
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`demo-hp`). It used to refuse before starting, tell the customer a running app „nincs telepítve",
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and send them to reinstall it "to the same place" — a place those 40 apps never offer, because they
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were never given a drive to choose. It was asking one question to answer two. Proven today on
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`privatebin`: data planted through the app itself, backed up, **deleted**, restored — **all 15 files
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back byte for byte**, Hungarian accented names included, message „0 fájl és 1 adatkötet
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visszaállítva". The 13 apps that do have a drive are unchanged, checked the same way.
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- **The off-site restore gives an app's data back at all** (R-354, controller 0.218.0). It used to say
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„0 fájl visszaállítva", report success, and the folder was simply not there. It now names what came
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back, because a restore that mentions only its file count is how a silent loss reads as a success.
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- **Paperless's database is in the backup, and restoring it takes an undo copy first** (R-355,
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controller 0.218.0). The dump was landing in a folder named after an app that does not exist. **One
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app of 53 was affected**, established with a check first proved able to catch a planted second case.
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- **The system tells you when it cannot see the off-site copies** (R-339) — a mail after ~30 minutes,
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hourly while it lasts, one all-clear. **Caveat:** it watches whether the machine answers, so it
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would *not* have caught the 18 August fault, where one service was wedged and the machine stayed
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healthy.
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- **The connection leak was ours and is fixed** (R-344). Our agent opened a connection to the off-site
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box every 15 minutes and never closed it; the idle timer was switched off. Proved by fixing one
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machine and leaving the other: same work, 4 more leaked on the untouched one, none on the fixed one.
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The off-site box is back to **17** open connections from **415**.
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- **A dated check can no longer be quietly missed** (R-341) — but it speaks on the next push, not on
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the day. **A machine we tell to be quiet is no longer reported as dead** (R-321). **One name per
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secret** (R-295, R-323). **The hub's own words are under a guard** (R-324). **Removal reverses the
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installation** (R-316). **A correct recovery code is no longer called wrong** (R-311). **The drive
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can be re-attached after a reinstall** (R-280).
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## Broken, or knowingly incomplete
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- **We do not know what the deep check costs on a BIG store** (R-401). Since 0.228.0 the weekly check
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re-reads **all** your stored data, not just the list of it. We had to: a copy was damaged in a way
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that left its size unchanged, and the old shallow check said „no errors were found". Only the deep
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check caught it. **The cost we measured was four seconds** — 35.0 s before, 39.2 s after — but that
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was on a 134 MB store, and it will not stay four seconds. So the box now tells us: any check that
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takes longer than five minutes writes a warning naming this item. **If you do nothing:** every
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machine re-reads its whole store every week, however large it grows, and the first person to notice
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would be a customer whose upload is busy. The warning is there so that does not happen.
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- **We ask the off-site box a question about once a second** (R-336) — ~85,000 a day for a box we
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write to weekly. The leak that made this dangerous is fixed (R-344); the volume is not. The ceiling
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is **under a year** away on the corrected measurement, not two.
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- **Peti's machine has no recovery route at all.** A real machine belonging to a real person, silent
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since 15 July, no key, no off-site copy, no local backup. **If that drive fails, everything on it is
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lost.** First act of any visit: copy the ~3.6 GB off before anything is reinstalled.
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- **The agent picks dnsmasq by looking at a file another package owns** (R-317) — one line; LAN name
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resolution goes missing quietly.
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- **Three facts the machines send still have no reader** (R-264); **the storage page has its own
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reason for an empty list** (R-298); **two thirds of the standing picture is unproven** (R-326:
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23 of 55 claims walked — `python3 scripts/unproven.py`); **the picture still describes one defect we
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fixed twice** (R-327).
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## Working on next
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The 2026-08-09 batch (R-279 … R-292), still untriaged; the three remaining R-264 readers; R-317 (one
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line in the agent); R-327 (decide the naming claim's status); R-359 (nothing reads the off-site store).
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