Pre-Mat-Day archive, 2026-09-03

The shared instructions require a verified archive of the whole repository before any cleanup deletion begins. This records the one taken for the 2026-09-03 integrate-and-clean pass.

The archive

Scope

Git decides it, rather than a hand-kept exclusion list that drifts from the ignore rules. The archive holds the primary worktree's Git administrative directory plus exactly what git ls-files and git ls-files --others --exclude-standard name, in the primary checkout and in every linked worktree.

Verified present after the fact rather than assumed:

Dependency trees, build output and caches are excluded because they rebuild from the archived source. Every commit, ref, reflog and stash is in the Git directory, and uncommitted work is in the untracked-but-not-ignored set.

Two failures the verification caught

Both looked like success from the outside, which is the entire argument for reading an archive back instead of checking that a file exists.

The first integrity test reported Can't open as archive because 7-Zip was still writing. The file was 436 MB at the time and looked finished.

The second attempt exited non-zero with three scan warnings. git ls-files quotes a path containing a non-ASCII character, so three logo assets whose names carry an en-dash reached the archiver wrapped in literal quotes and were skipped. Re-running the enumeration with core.quotePath=false brought the count of quoted paths to zero, and the finished archive contains all nine of them across the three checkouts.