Backups

A phone screenshot of an error turned into a day of storage work: an audit of 4,921 pulled photo edits found 3,777 byte-identical to their originals, 108 GB reclaimed, a 3.4 TB library moved with an instant rename, and five separate ways a copy or a delete can lie to you.

Listing sites edit and pull their own pages. Homestead keeps every capture as immutable evidence and rebuilds the searchable database from it, so a delisted house keeps its record.

The timer that snapshots Loupe's databases reported success while the newest snapshot in the destination was three days old. Two scheduled runs had failed and a manual test run had overwritten the status. Then a real restore drill, which checked four properties and first failed on my own script's assumption.

A session meant to make a backup claim checkable first read the config wrong and nearly 'repaired' a healthy setup, then proved one restore, then opened an alarm about unbounded growth. The follow-up the same day measured the alarm and found two of its load-bearing facts wrong. Ruling: accept.

I had encrypted backups of my private records and had never once put one back. Proving it worked also revealed that the older archive contained nothing at all.

My notes sync between three machines went through one of them, which made that machine a single point of failure for the other two. I paired the outer two directly, then proved the claim both ways by pausing the middle machine and timing a canary file across. The procedure I had approved turned out not to exist yet, and the documented emergency command had the wrong verb.

Three database backups written to network storage two weeks earlier were all zero bytes. The cause was an idle timeout on the mount tearing it down mid-write. The obvious retry then failed instantly for a second, unrelated reason, and the worker stopped and asked instead of improvising.

Built a static, backend-free demo of the Loupe cull UI, untangled an edited-render pull that reported success while writing nothing, fixed an importer that choked on Live Photos, and reorganized all my project notes into one place.

The whole project finally lives somewhere other than my one machine: I pushed a private backup of the repo. Then a small but careful change to how the app resolves edited renders so it stops checking thousands of network files on every restart, plus a power-outage readiness check and a move of my project notes vault out of the folders iCloud sweeps.

I merged Loupe's pipeline repo into the app repo as a folder with its history intact, untangled a code-vs-data path coupling that would have quietly broken everything, and then (right before the first push to a private GitHub repo) ran a full-history audit that came back dirty. It found a home address, GPS coordinates, and a dump of my home network's internal layout buried in old commits. The rest of the day was rewriting history to purge all of it, normalizing my commit identity, and collapsing everything to a single clean branch.

A wide day: shipped a dormant glass redesign and a fully responsive header, chased a stats box that kept clipping, traced six photo-pairing mis-binds down to a filename suffix, sorted out the faithful way to pull edited photos, relocated my notes vault, and ran a security review I'm keeping vague on purpose.

The day Loupe stopped being a thing that only runs on my machine. I reframed it as a self-hostable product, made the pipeline portable through environment variables, scrubbed both repos clean for publishing, finalized a brand and header, fixed the photobook's repetition problem, and registered loupeculling.com for a marketing site.

The day the project got a name and a spine: I came back to a box that had silently rebooted, merged two sibling photo-review apps into one managed service called Loupe, added a cloud backup and AI-written period summaries, and built an enrichment layer that joins Apple's own labels, people, and scores back onto my library by UUID.

A long day: turning a 462 GB copy into an instant rename by understanding the filesystem, catching two backup processes about to trample each other, and building two browser tools to actually review ~91,000 photos without ever deleting one by accident.