Backups

The problem I set out to solve My homelab takes a backup every night at 20:30. A cron job runs a script, the script dumps my Authentik database, snapshots the Vaultwarden vault, tars up the configs, encrypts a copy with age and drops it into OneDrive. It writes everything it does to /var/log/lab-backup.log. And nobody reads /var/log/lab-backup.log. That was the thing bothering me. If the backup silently stopped, I wouldn’t find out when it stopped — I’d find out the day I needed a restore, which is the worst possible day to learn anything. So the plan was simple: get n8n to check the backup actually happened, and buzz my phone if it didn’t. ...

The identity provider quietly became load-bearing and had no backup. Building one taught me more about database internals than building the identity provider did. Stack: Bash · Postgres · SQLite · age · cron · OneDrive 1. Purpose The identity provider started as a nice-to-have. Single sign-on for a dashboard — pleasant, not critical. Then it took over the firewall’s login. That’s the moment the risk profile changed, and it changed without any decision being made about it. Nobody sat down and said “let’s make the firewall depend on this container.” It happened one integration at a time, and the dependency graph grew quietly underneath. ...