The backup service comes back on its own after a host restart

The backup server was set never to start automatically. If the machine hosting it restarted, it stayed off until somebody noticed.

That was the worst possible thing to leave switched off, because nothing would have announced it. Backups would simply stop, and with alerting that only speaks on failure, silence would have looked identical to success.

It now starts by itself. Paired with the new weekly report, an outage that outlasts a restart shows up as a report that fails to arrive.