The watchdog deletes everything at the deadline regardless of outcome, so a successful whole-network archive is destroyed on schedule unless someone acts. Records the mechanism (volume delete-protection -- Hetzner Cloud has no volume snapshots), the two consequences (the watchdog's volume drain exits non-zero, and destroy.sh will refuse a protected volume), and that retention bills whether attached or not. Also separates preserving the archive from promoting the experiment to a standing instance: the experiment shape is deliberately temporary and should not be converted in a hurry at hour 71. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>