On the release that adds the ledger the table is empty, so on a host that has
been uploading nightly for months every account read Never, under a sentence
saying no copy had ever reached the bucket. That sentence is untrue on exactly
the morning an operator opens the new card for the first time, and it is a
claim the host cannot make: what is empty is the record, not the bucket.
The run now records every account it walks, not only the ones an object came
of. A walk that produced nothing moves the attempt instant and leaves the
success columns alone, so the two cases separate: no row at all is no record
yet, a row without a success is never. Never now means what the word says —
a run looked at this account and has never put anything there.
The card names the last check on the never row, so the state is a fact with a
timestamp rather than an assertion. Runbook and all seven bundles carry the
same two sentences. The integration file proves both arms against real
Postgres, including that a failed run leaves the previous good copy on the
row.
The column was INTEGER. A single object may occupy 8 MiB across 10 000
multipart parts, which is the 80 GB the uploader explicitly permits, and
Postgres INTEGER stops at 2.1 GB. An account between the two uploads fine and
then cannot be recorded, so the biggest account on the host is the one the
console would have to report on and could not.
BIGINT in the table, BigInt in the model, Number() where the route builds the
wire row so the payload type stays a plain number. The migration is edited in
place rather than followed by a second one: the table has not shipped, and a
column widened before its first release is one column, not a history.
The comparison with the in-database backup does not carry over, for the
record: that size is octet_length over a bytea Postgres caps at 1 GB, while
this object never touches the database at all.
The nightly off-host job reports counts — uploaded, failed, total — and a
count cannot name the account it is failing for. A cohort where one object
has been refused every night for a month reads as "99 uploaded, 1 failed"
each time, which looks like weather rather than like an account with no
disaster-recovery copy at all.
The worker now writes a ledger row when an object lands (account, instant,
size), and Admin → Backups gains a second card that rates every account
against the nightly schedule: fresh inside one run, due when one run
produced nothing, stale when two did not, never when no object has ever
landed. On a host without BACKUP_S3_* the card says off-host backup is not
configured and stops there.
The verdicts are computed from the ledger, never from a bucket listing: the
worker's grant is deliberately PutObject + GetObject, and an admin page must
not put the operator's credentials on its render path to state a number the
database already holds.
Marc-André Bombeck