Waters ChurchandClaude Opus 5
d188308d1f
The plist existed only in the transfer bundle, in a version that still pointed at ~/Documents — the path that macOS TCC silently refuses to let launchd execute from, and the reason the nightly backup did nothing for eight days while logging nothing. Captured from the ingest Mac as it now runs, with a README explaining why the checkout must live outside ~/Documents and why the script cannot glob the Drive folder. Both are easy to undo by accident and expensive to rediscover. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Deployment bits that live outside the app
org.waterschurch.checklist-drive-backup.plist
The LaunchAgent that runs the nightly off-site backup. It belongs in
~/Library/LaunchAgents/ on one always-on Mac — currently the ingest Mac
(NA-Ingest, account Studio). Install with:
cp deploy/org.waterschurch.checklist-drive-backup.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.waterschurch.checklist-drive-backup.plist
The path in it matters more than it looks. It points at ~/checklist-app, not
~/Documents/…, and that is not cosmetic: macOS TCC does not let launchd execute
anything inside ~/Documents, ~/Desktop or ~/Downloads. When the project lived in
~/Documents the agent failed instantly every night with
/bin/bash: …/backup-to-drive.sh: Operation not permitted
logging nothing, for eight days, because the script never started. Keep the checkout outside those folders on any machine that runs this agent.
The same restriction applies one level down: launchd can stat a named file under
~/Library/CloudStorage but cannot list the directory, which is why
backup-to-drive.sh checks explicit filenames instead of globbing.
A LaunchAgent only fires while that user is logged in. If the Mac is asleep at 04:15, launchd runs the job shortly after it wakes, so a missed night self-heals — but a Mac that is off, or logged out, backs nothing up and says nothing.