At 2 a.m., our user group exploded — people were saying data had just vanished, as if the browser had “eaten” it. Our frontend stores application state in IndexedDB, which is supposed to be far more reliable than localStorage. How could it disappear without a trace? I spent two hours digging through logs and backend records before zeroing in on a dark secret of browser storage: when disk space gets tight, Chrome will silently delete IndexedDB data without any notification. Worse, you can’t reproduce it by hand because you’re not running on the “chosen” hard drive. I decided to write an automated test with Playwright that simulates browser crashes and storage pressure — and expose IndexedDB’s real behavior. Breaking down the problem IndexedDB was designed to be a client-side persistent storage, and the W3C spec even says “data should be kept as long as possible”. But a spec is one thing; what browser vendors actually implement is another.…