Worked much of the early morning on a reliable backup process for my Indigo data. For many years - at least a decade - my Indigo instance has run on an old “Trashcan” Mac Pro. I honestly cannot believe that the thing is running still. It’s from the Intel Mac era of course, circa 2014 and produces an incredible amount of heat. Yet someshow it just keeps on ticking. But I imagine its days are numbered, so I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what will happen when it dies completely. Obviously recreating my Devices, Variables, Actions, Triggers and Schedules is the most important. With dozens, maybe hundreds of bespoke and interlocking scripts, it would be a major undertaking to create it all from scratch.

The backup process that I landed on is based on restic, which is well-engineered, reliable and can backup to an AWS S3 bucket. With offsite storage, it satisfies a major threat model - theft, fire, flooding, etc.

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Cobbling this system together this morning, though raised another question - which is how to quickly get up to speed when disaster strikes and get it up and running again. So I created a note in my Obsidian vault 20260910062326 Using restic to backup Indigo, cross-linked it and linked it up to appropriate structure notes; and I put a to-do item in Omnifocus to review it every 3 months. I don’t need to memorize all the details. Just enough to hit the ground running.

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Speaking of note-taking. Yes, I adopt some of the conventions and terminology from the Zettelkasten world, but my collection of notes is in no way a formal Zettelkasten. I’ve read their posts and forums for hours and I still don’t quite “get” what they are talking about. I’m not writing academic papers or books. I need to remember and find stuff. I need to refine and clarify my thinking about topics. For myself. That clarity is the work product.