Sorry, I must’ve misremembered about systemd. It’s how my installs start up, and the unit file is not in the usual location for systemd units I’ve created myself, so my assumption is it came with Kopia. There is no systemd timer though, and one isn’t needed.

in the past week, it did not backup anything. Hence, there is no scheduler built into kopia automagically as described/ hinted in the docs.

Was Kopia running during that time?

If you run Kopia commands, then it will perform the instructed task, and then exit. It will obviously not do anything after completing whatever command was given, as the process will have exited, leaving no kopia process running on the system.

Starting it up in in server mode kopia server start however, which is what you do to have it running as a background daemon. When running, it allows you to log into the web interface or configure it via cli to do whatever you like. And as long as the process starts along with the host system, that’s all there is to it.

How the daemon is set up to start, doesn’t really matter. And if you want to use your own scheduling, (cron or a systemd timer) you can do that, too.