Proposal for making "I'm rebuilding my server" a first-class first-run
path. Recording it before building because the useful finding is how
little is actually missing.
The restore machinery is already there: locationAdd connects a repo,
restoreFirstRunDiscover reads it without touching live state,
migrateDiscoverHosts/Apps enumerate what is in it, backupRestoreSystemConfig
brings settings and credentials back, restoreFirstRunBulk restores many
apps from another host, migrateUrlRewrite fixes host-bound CFG_* fields,
and storageRestoreAppTo already handles a snapshot whose paths don't
match this machine. What is missing is the front door and one screen.
That screen is the reconciliation diff — a backup describes a machine
that no longer exists, and the failure mode worth designing against is
re-deciding those facts silently. Every difference is detectable before
anything is written: a storage location that doesn't exist here, an app
bigger than the target drive, domains pointing at the old host, ports
already taken, apps this version no longer ships.
Two things the doc is deliberately blunt about.
An encrypted repository cannot be opened with anything inside itself. The
location password lives in the system config, which is inside the backup,
so on a fresh machine the user must supply it by hand — that is what
encryption means, not a bug. It has to be asked for early, because a user
who never wrote it down does not have a backup and should learn that at
step 2 rather than step 5.
And "upload the backup file" doesn't match the engines: restic, borg and
kopia write to a repository, not a file. Local means navigating to a path;
remote means credentials. A genuine single-file import is a separate
feature (a portable per-app export built on the manifest) and shouldn't
be conflated with the backup engines.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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