plat 147

← Pulse platform issue index

PLAT-147 — the managed backup path can track its own Git bundle, causing every backup to recursively embed prior backups

Coordination	Value
Assigned agent	unassigned
Ticket state	contained — canonical path guard, future-agent Git guidance, bundle deletion, and verified history cleanup shipped; generalized managed external archive lifecycle/health remains separate product work
Last synchronized	2026-08-19

• Priority: P0 — unbounded disk growth can make the machine unusable while the resulting backup becomes slow, stale, or impossible to verify.
• Owner: Pulse/finalizer backup contract, backup destination validation, workflow-builder guidance, and backup health reporting.
• Observed on: Tectonic USA Day Trading.

Live evidence

• backup/wf-backup.bundle was approximately 67 GB before its explicitly authorized deletion on 2026-08-19.
• the workflow repository's .git directory is approximately 133 GB.
• git ls-files confirms the generated bundle is itself tracked.
• repository history repeatedly commits that bundle.
• the backup status reports bundle generation timing out and the portable bundle remaining stale.

This forms a self-amplifying graph: a bundle is committed into the repository, then the next bundle includes repository history containing the previous bundle.

Root cause

The backup contract relies on agent instructions but has no structural guard on the destination. A generated backup may be placed and tracked inside the source repository it snapshots. Git then treats the backup as ordinary source content, and later backups recursively preserve it.

Fix reasoning

Generated repository backups must live outside the repository being backed up, for example under a platform-owned backup root keyed by workflow identity.

Before running a backup, the platform should:

1. canonicalize source and destination paths;
2. reject a destination inside the source repository or its .git directory;
3. reject a destination reported by git ls-files;
4. write to a temporary external path, validate git bundle verify, then atomically replace the previous good bundle;
5. report abnormal repository/bundle growth and retain the last verified backup on failure.

The tracked working-tree bundle has now been deleted. On 2026-08-19 the repository history was rebuilt with only backup/wf-backup.bundle removed. Before replacing the object store, the cleanup verified that every other path and blob at main matched the original tree, ran strict object validation, and preserved all six pre-existing working-tree modifications byte-for-byte. The resulting repository is approximately 177 MiB instead of 133 GiB.

A complete, verified 166 MiB recovery bundle now lives outside the source repository at /Users/mipl/ai-work/.agentworks-backups/tectonicusadaytrading/filtered-history-2026-08-19.bundle. Cleanup metadata records the old/new heads, tree comparison, status comparison, and copies of the uncommitted files. The remaining product work is to make this external, verified, atomic backup lifecycle and its health reporting a normal platform capability rather than a one-off recovery procedure.

Future workflow agents now receive an explicit Git contract: the ordinary local checkpoint is the commit itself; generated bundles/ZIPs/tarballs must never be created in or staged from the source repository; and staged paths must be inspected before commit. The shell bridge independently blocks relative, ambiguous, symlink-resolved in-repository, and other in-source git bundle create destinations. This prevents recurrence even if an agent ignores the guidance.

Acceptance

• Attempting to create a bundle under the source repository fails before write.
• A tracked destination fails with a clear actionable error.
• External temporary generation and atomic replacement preserve the last good bundle when verification or timeout fails.
• Repeated backups of an unchanged repository have bounded, stable size.
• Backup health exposes source size, bundle size, verification status, and timestamp without requiring an agent to inspect Git manually.