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• 8 MAY 2026 · homelab observability

  Cron jobs you've actually restored from

  

  A cron job that has never successfully completed its restore path isn’t a backup — it’s a hopeful gesture.

  Mine sync OpenClaw config and a couple of small Postgres dumps to a Pi at my parents’ place. I’ve restored from them twice. Once was a real “the Mac mini died” event; once was deliberate, a drill I scheduled because the first restore had been suspiciously easy and I wanted to be sure it wasn’t fluke-shaped.

  The drill found a thing: a path that was wrong on the new machine because I’d moved a directory three months earlier. Backups still succeeded — the failure was downstream, in the restore script that assumed the old layout. That’s the class of bug that only ever shows up in a drill.

  Lesson, written down where I’ll see it again: successful backups aren’t evidence of working restores. Run the drill.