Homelab operations automation

A collection of scheduled maintenance routines for file hygiene, database backups, retention and failure notifications on a personal Linux system.

automation · in use

Designer and operator · Updated Aug 2026

  • Homelab
  • Backups
  • Systemd
  • Operational safety

01 · Problem

Small but important maintenance work—organizing transient files and verifying cloud-database backups—is easy to defer until it becomes a recovery problem.

02 · System

Systemd timers run bounded cleanup and backup jobs, verify their results, apply retention rules and report failures through logs and Slack.

03 · Outcome

Downloads organization and nightly Supabase dumps run as inspectable host services with safety checks, compression verification and dated retention.

Context

These routines favor boring, inspectable operating primitives. The goal is reliable recovery and maintenance, not a generalized automation platform.

Architecture

  1. 01Python file classification and safe-move routine
  2. 02Systemd services and timers
  3. 03Containerized pg_dump against Supabase databases
  4. 04Compressed-backup verification and rolling retention
  5. 05Journald and Slack operational reporting

Decisions & trade-offs

Verify before pruning

A new database dump must complete, meet a minimum size and pass gzip verification before older recovery points are removed.

Evidence

  • Scheduled weekly file organization
  • Nightly per-project database dumps with two-week retention
  • Failure paths recorded locally and surfaced through notifications

What this taught me

  • Operational automation earns trust through explicit abort conditions and verifiable artifacts.