Enable auto-pay or terminate idle pods yourself before leaving them, and treat the network volume as the only safety net, since deleted pods are not recoverable. Never hardcode external port mappings: re-read them from the connect panel after each restart. Use full direct-TCP SSH for file transfers, not the proxied SSH.

Context: A RunPod deployment profile documents the low-balance trap. A depleted balance auto-stops pods, with storage still billing, and depleted-balance or 30-day-stale pods get deleted with no backups kept. Separately, the proxied basic SSH cannot do scp, sftp, or rsync, and external TCP port mappings are re-assigned on every reset, so hardcoded ports and bulk transfers over the proxy fail after a restart.