Status & backups

The Status & backups page (/status) answers two questions at a glance: is my archive fresh? and are my disaster-recovery backups accumulating as expected? Like everything else in msgbrowse it is read-only and local — it reports on your archive without touching it.

Archive freshness

A stat strip shows the total conversation count, total message count, and the timestamp of the newest message in the database. If the newest message is older than you expect, your export or import pipeline has probably stalled — run msgbrowse sync (or check your scheduled exporter job).

Ingest stats

The Last ingest card summarizes the most recent import run:

• when it finished and how long it took,
• conversations changed vs. scanned,
• total messages and how many were added,
• skipped lines and errors.

Imports are incremental and idempotent, so a healthy steady-state run shows a small "added" count and zero errors. A growing skipped-line count is worth a look — it usually means the exporter's output format changed.

Encrypted snapshot inventory

If your export pipeline persists raw database snapshots under the archive's .snapshots/ directory (the recommended Signal backup setup writes SQLCipher-encrypted db-YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS.tar files there), the status page inventories them: filename, when each was taken, size, its GFS retention tier (daily / monthly / quarterly / yearly), and the total on-disk footprint.

Listed, never opened

The .snapshots/*.tar files are SQLCipher-encrypted disaster-recovery backups. msgbrowse inventories them by filename and size only — it never opens, decrypts, or reads their contents, and never touches the macOS Keychain. That guarantee is part of the product's threat model (see SECURITY.md).

Configuration

Key	What it shapes
archive_root	Where the .snapshots/ directory is discovered.
data_dir	Where the SQLite database with ingest-run history lives.