The nightly copy to Drive had been dead since 15 September. DRIVE_DIR pointed at
Apps/Backups/Checklist Backups; the folder is Apps/Checklist Backups, with no
Backups level. The guard for a missing folder did its job and exited — into a
logfile nobody reads, so from the outside a broken backup and a healthy no-op
looked identical. Eight days were missing; this run copied them.
That is the second time the same failure has hidden in the same place. The
header comment already records the first: ten weeks stale in July, found in
September. Correcting the path alone would leave the mechanism that hid it
untouched, so:
- The Drive folder is probed rather than hard-coded, across every mounted
GoogleDrive-* account and both known folder layouts. The laptop mounts
christian@ where the Studio mounts media@, and the folder has moved once
already, so a literal path is the wrong thing to depend on.
- Every failure now emails as well as logs, via scripts/alert.js, which reuses
the server's own SMTP settings. A failed alert never masks the failure it was
reporting.
- A run that does not error but leaves the newest off-site copy more than
STALE_DAYS old now alerts too. That is the check that would have caught both
incidents; the error paths only fire when the script actually runs.
What this still cannot catch is the script never running at all — a sleeping
Mac or an unloaded LaunchAgent is silent by construction.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
