# lab note
Automation Clinic: a community backup that lied about success
A submitted pain point — backups “succeeded” but restored to garbage. We fixed it live.
1 min readAutomation Clinic
Sean · wrote this at the bench
backupsreliability
A reader’s backup job exited 0 every night and produced unrestorable archives. Green checkmarks, zero confidence. We added a restore test to the pipeline.
The problem
A small, annoying task that was eating time and attention every week. We measured it before touching anything.
The approach
One focused change, reproducible, with a guardrail and an obvious way to turn it off. No magic, no vibes.
$ ./run --dry-run
[ ok ] plan looks sane
$ ./run --applyThe receipts
Before/after benchmarks, the failure modes we hit, and the tradeoffs we accepted. The repo has the full runbook.
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