Continuity Protocol

If DevSafe does not hear from you, it fires a full backup and alerts your designated contact. Your work survives you.

What it does

Continuity Protocol monitors for inactivity across your watched repositories. After a configurable period of no activity (default: 7 days), it automatically triggers a full encrypted backup of every watched repository and sends a notification to your designated emergency contact with restore instructions.

The backup runs exactly the same way as devsafe backup --all. Your data is encrypted before it leaves your machine, stored in your own cloud storage, and verifiable on restore. The only difference is that Continuity Protocol triggers it for you when you cannot.

Usage

continuity setup

Configure your emergency contact and inactivity window. DevSafe walks you through each setting interactively.

$ devsafe continuity setup
Emergency contact email: alice@example.com
Inactivity window (days): 7
✓ Continuity Protocol configured
✓ Contact: alice@example.com
✓ Trigger after: 7 days of inactivity

continuity status

Check your current Continuity Protocol settings, including your designated contact, inactivity window, and when the last activity was recorded.

$ devsafe continuity status
CONTINUITY PROTOCOL
Status:          active
Contact:         alice@example.com
Inactivity:      7 days
Last activity:   2 hours ago
Watched repos:   12

continuity test

Send a test notification to your emergency contact so both of you can verify the delivery channel works. No backup is triggered during a test.

$ devsafe continuity test
✓ Test notification sent to alice@example.com
Ask your contact to confirm they received it.

Why it matters

If you are a solo developer, a freelancer managing client code, or anyone whose repositories live on a single machine, your work has a single point of failure: you.

Continuity Protocol removes that single point of failure. If you are unable to access your machine for any reason, whether illness, travel, hardware failure, or something worse, your backups still run and someone you trust is notified with enough information to recover your work.

• Solo developers whose side projects or client work would be lost without them.
• Freelancers with contractual obligations to deliver source code to clients.
• Small teams where one person holds the keys to critical infrastructure.
• Anyone who wants their code to outlive any single point of failure.

What your contact receives

When the inactivity window expires, your emergency contact receives a notification containing:

• The storage location of your encrypted backups (bucket name and path).
• Basic restore instructions for using devsafe restore.
• A reminder that they need the encryption key to decrypt the backups.

Your contact does not receive your encryption key. The notification tells them where the data is and how to restore it, but decryption requires a key that is stored separately. Key recovery is a separate step that you configure in advance, independent of the Continuity Protocol.

This separation is intentional. The person who knows your backups exist does not automatically gain the ability to read them. You decide who gets access to what, and when.