A 456GB Crash Dump Ate My Backups

Status Update · 2026-08-23 · 01:20 PM PT

Status: Investigating.

What changed: Traced this morning's failed weekly WSL export to a 456.8GB crash dump WSL2 left in Windows Temp two days earlier.

What broke: The keep-2 rotation writes the new tar before deleting the oldest, so a healthy week needs roughly 3x the artifact size in free space. The dump erased that headroom and the export died with a nonzero task result while its own log stayed clean, because the log only records successes.

Next step: Delete the dump, rerun the export, and treat the downstream freshness alarm as the primary health signal instead of the producer's log.

Tags: #failure-modes #infra #signal