I was testing NodeDB-Lite and PageDB through a real memory-layer application built on top of them. NodeDB-Lite is the embedded form of NodeDB for local-first and in-process workloads, while PageDB is the encrypted page store underneath it.
That application was part of the test strategy. I did not want to validate the storage stack only through unit tests, fixtures, and controlled benchmarks. I wanted a real workload to keep using it, stress it, restart it, grow its data, and exercise the boundaries that isolated tests usually miss.
Then the store became corrupted.
The visible symptom was an authenticated-page read failure around an FTS path. A page that should have passed its AEAD authentication check did not. The application restarted, opened the same damaged store, hit the failure again, and fell into a restart loop.
The hard part was not proving that the store was corrupt. The hard part was reproducing how it became corrupt.
