## 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](launchd.html) 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.

## Read more

- [pmset](https://ss64.com/mac/pmset.html)
- [Time Machine](https://support.apple.com/en-us/104984)
- [Backblaze](https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup)