Kept short so I actually finish them.
I moved this site back to plain files. No database, no build step I have to babysit, no admin panel to patch at midnight. A folder of HTML, one stylesheet, an SVG favicon. If the server reboots, the site is already there; there is no process to come back up.
The test I use now: could I rebuild it from a backup on a laptop with no internet? If the answer is no, it is too clever for a personal page.
Every few months I write the same OnCalendar line and get it
subtly wrong. So here it is once: OnCalendar=Sun *-*-* 20:00:00
for a weekly job, and Persistent=true so a missed run fires on
the next boot instead of vanishing. Check the next fire time with
systemctl list-timers before trusting any of it.
The mistake I always make is testing the .service by hand,
seeing it work, and forgetting the timer was never enable --nowd.
I had nightly snapshots for two years and had never once restored one. When I finally tried, the archive unpacked with the wrong owner and half the permissions were nonsense. The backup was fine; my restore was broken, and I only found out by doing it.
Now the drill runs quarterly: pull last night's archive onto a clean box, restore it, boot the thing, confirm it actually serves. A backup is not the artifact. It is the successful restore.