The problem this solves
Imagine your laptop dies on a Tuesday. If it was the device backing up your vault, then nothing on that machine can warn you — a dead device is a dead alarm. Only the service that receives your backups can notice the silence. That is exactly what Clawgnition's freshness check does.
How the check works
Your centraid client declares a check-in cadence — how often it expects to back up (for example, roughly once an hour). Clawgnition watches the gap since your most recent backup. If that gap grows past twice the cadence your client declared, we send you an email letting you know new backups appear to have stopped.
The doubling is deliberate breathing room: a single missed cycle will not email you. Only a gap clearly longer than expected does.
The check only works if your client has declared a cadence. That declaration is the baseline the check measures silence against. A vault whose client never declares a cadence gives Clawgnition nothing to compare against, so no freshness email can ever fire for it. When you set up centraid, make sure it declares a check-in cadence — see Guided setup.
One email per quiet period
You will never be nagged. When a vault goes quiet, exactly one email goes out. The check then stays silent until a real backup resumes, at which point it re-arms for the next quiet period. If your device is genuinely retired, you can simply ignore the message — that is a valid way to resolve it.
Brand-new vaults that never back up
A new vault is a special case: there is no cadence yet because nothing has ever backed up. So a vault that is created but never completes a first backup is watched with a generous grace period of about 72 hours. If no first backup lands in that window, you get one reminder that the vault has not completed its first backup. Once a first backup arrives, the vault switches to the normal cadence check described above.
What the email says
The message is plain and calm. It tells you which vault has gone quiet, when its last backup was, and that the most likely cause is the device being offline, asleep, or no longer running centraid. It suggests opening centraid on that device to check its backup status, and notes that if the device is retired you can safely ignore the message. Crucially, it reassures you that your existing backups are untouched — this is only a heads-up that new backups have paused, not a sign that anything was lost.
Clearing a false alarm
A "false alarm" here means the email fired but you are actually fine with the silence — for example, you retired that device on purpose, or the cadence is stricter than how you really use the vault. Any of these resolves it:
- Do nothing. There is only ever one email per quiet period. Ignoring it is a complete resolution.
- Loosen the cadence. If the check is too eager for how you really back up, raise the declared cadence in centraid's vault settings. The new, longer expectation takes effect right away.
- Resume backups. Any real backup re-arms the check and clears the alarm automatically — no manual reset needed.
What this check is not
A freshness email does not mean your data was lost, corrupted, or deleted. Your stored backups are exactly as they were. The email is only about the gap since your last new backup — it is an early warning so you can decide whether that gap is expected.
Common questions
I have several vaults. Will I get flooded with emails?
No. The check is per vault and sends at most one email per vault per quiet period. A vault that is backing up normally is silent.
The email fired but my device is fine — did I lose data?
No. Your existing backups are untouched. Open centraid on the backing-up device, confirm it is running and online, and let it back up once to clear the alarm.
I never got an email even though my device was off for days.
The most common reason is that the client never declared a check-in cadence, so there was no baseline to measure against. Check centraid's hosted-storage settings and make sure a cadence is set. See Guided setup.