Backups and the UPS
What the UPS protects, what it does not, and the one check that makes a backup real.
What the UPS bought you
Two things. A clean shutdown or a ride-through during a short outage,
so a database mid-write does not get corrupted and a container does not
come up with a half-written file. And surge protection, which is the
quieter reason to own one. It does not protect against the disk dying, a
bad rm, or an agent with too many permissions. Those are
what backups are for.
Turn on “Start up automatically after a power failure” in Energy
settings, or sudo pmset -a autorestart 1. Without that, the
mini stays off after the battery runs out and the UPS has only delayed
the outage. The launchd page has the rest of
the chain.
What to back up
The vault is in git, so it is already off the mini. What is not:
~/.claude (auto memory, settings, the plists you wrote),
the Docker volumes for n8n and Kuma, and whatever the agent’s own folder
holds. Time Machine to a USB SSD covers the Mac side for the cost of the
drive. For off-site, Backblaze personal backup is the low-effort answer
and it runs as a menu-bar app.
The check that makes it real
A backup that has never been restored from is a hope. Once a month, restore one file from Time Machine and one from the off-site copy, and open it. The failure mode this catches is the job that has been exiting 0 for six weeks while writing nothing, which is a real thing Jeff’s crew found in a backup that “worked.” Verify content, not exit codes.
How you know it worked
The restored file opens and is the version you expected. Write the date on a sticky note on the UPS. That is the whole ritual.