David's ask: back up the brain before the one-time upgrade, drop it after. On
open, when the on-disk format is stale (a 7.x→8.0 rebuild will run) and the store
holds data, brainy hard-link-snapshots the brain dir to a sibling
`<brainDir>.migration-backup` BEFORE any provider rebuilds — near-zero cost/space
(shared inodes; the store is immutable-by-rename), instant even at scale. Removed
automatically once the upgrade verifies + stamps the marker; retained on failure
for rollback. Default-on; opt out with `migrationBackup: false`.
- Reuses the existing snapshotToDirectory() hard-link farm via new optional
adapter methods createMigrationBackup()/removeMigrationBackup() (filesystem
only — feature-detected; memory + non-fs are a graceful no-op).
- Taken before the native provider inits, so it captures true pre-migration
state; a prior failed upgrade's backup is reused, not overwritten.
- Best-effort: a backup failure never blocks the upgrade (the migration is itself
safe — reads canonical, reconstructable, self-heals). Catastrophe-insurance
against a migration bug, not a data-loss guard or an off-device backup.
4 lifecycle tests (adapter hard-link / reuse / remove-without-touching-live /
empty→null; stale-epoch reopen create+remove; opt-out; memory no-op). Gates:
typecheck 0, build 0, test:unit 1753/1753, layout-migration suite 5/5.
David Snelling
1aad1f67de