serato-doctor/docs/design/backup-recovery-center.md

Backup recovery center

Problem

An immediate undo button is not enough. A DJ may restart Serato Doctor, notice an issue later, or need to understand how much disk space safety snapshots use.

Architecture

The recovery center reads the existing JSON manifests beneath _Serato_/.serato-doctor-backups/. It reports creation time, selected keeper, affected paths, restore status, and snapshot size. Invalid or incomplete backup folders are ignored rather than presented as restorable.

Restore remains conservative: it only replaces a symbolic-link alias and refuses to overwrite a real file. A successful restore records its timestamp in the manifest so the UI cannot accidentally offer the same rollback twice.

Edge cases

• No backup directory is treated as an empty history.
• Malformed manifests do not prevent valid backups from loading.
• Restored snapshots remain visible for audit purposes and disk accounting.
• Backups can only be restored through the Serato library that owns them.

Tests

• Backup history reports size and ready status.
• Restore changes the persistent status to restored.
• Static recovery assets are included in the package.