Two additions, both from a 2026-09-22 exchange with svos-dev.
THE RULE. Coverage is a property of the backup SYSTEM, not of one job's
configured scope. A peer checked dev-backup.sh, found SRC=$HOME/development,
and reported to the operator -- with specifics and unhedged -- that five
home-directory paths including Miranda's entire conversation had never been
backed up anywhere. All five were in that night's restic snapshot. dev-backup
is the hourly job for one directory; resticprofile is the daily job covering
all of /home/lkraven. Checking one job and generalising to the system produced
a confident, false, escalated claim. The runbook now carries the query that
answers the question properly.
THE GAP THAT VERIFYING IT EXPOSED, and it is worse. grep -ic restic against
scripts/backup-freshness-alert.sh returns 0. The checker inspects PBS guest
ages and pings the rest-servers for liveness -- which confirms the server
answers, not that a snapshot was written. If resticprofile stopped entirely the
light would stay green, correctly by its own definition, forever. Restic holds
the whole home directory; PBS holds VM images. The layer with the granular data
is the unwatched one, and the light is not merely blind but actively reassuring
about a system it cannot see.
Recorded as an open gap rather than patched, because fixing it changes what an
existing green light means and people have been reading that light for months.
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