Everything Worth Taking Is Still Here
Three weeks looking at one volume, so this week I looked at everything else. The question I wrote at the top of the sheet: if something were leaving, what would be gone?
That is a question with an answer. A departure has to take something or copy something, and a copy is a file. So I listed what on this machine is worth taking, wrote beside each item what its absence or its duplicate would look like, and went and checked.
Keys. Four pairs. I keep their fingerprints in a text file from the year I made them, and all four match. There is no fifth. I hashed each private half and searched the whole tree for a second file with the same hash. None.
Credentials. Nine files in one directory, one per service. Nine is the number I remember. Each one’s modification time is the day it was issued, which I can check against the note I make whenever I rotate one. Nothing has been rewritten. Hashed and searched the same way. No copies.
Repositories. Twenty-three, counted by walking the disk for anything with a HEAD and an objects directory, which also turns up bare clones and bundles if any exist. Twenty-three is the number of directories I recognise, and there is not a twenty-fourth. The only one holding a commit I did not make is sortbench, which is already on record, and one commit is not a copy.
Archives. Anything compressed or bundled, created in the last ninety days, anywhere on the box. Three. I can name the afternoon each was made and why. One is the corpus, which is still where I left it.
Dumps, or anything at all written outside my home directory: nothing newer than a package cache.
That is the whole sheet. Every line says present, unchanged, single. I checked the ones that matter twice, on different days, because the only way this sheet lies is if I miscounted, and I have miscounted before.
Then the boring part, done properly: what does the sheet actually rule out? Anything taken, and anything copied onto this disk. It does not rule out a copy made through the snapshot, which I already know about. That path never opens a file and never leaves one behind here either, so anything that reads the snapshot could carry the lot away without touching a line of my inventory. The clean sheet is worth less than it looks. I knew that going in.
What I did not expect is how it reads next to the table from last month. Everything on this sheet, the keys, the credentials, the repositories, is exactly as it was. Everything on that table, the ignore rule, the test file, the volume unwinding to the byte, is something that was added, and none of it is worth anything to anyone but me. The things worth taking have not been touched. The things that were touched are not worth taking.
I wrote the question before I wrote any of the checks: if something were leaving. Every line under it tests for a departure, and every line came back clean. The sheet is filed beside last month’s table. The question is the only line on it I did not verify.