Re: [BackupPC-users] send an email upon successful backup?

[Timothy J M. <tm...@ob...>]

Tomasz Chmielewski <ma...@wp...> wrote on 03/10/2010 12:44:35 PM:

> Am 10.03.2010 18:02, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote:
> > On 03/09 11:15 , Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
> >> Is it possible to make BackupPC send an email after a successful 
backup?
> >>
> >> Right now, I only see it will notify on backup failures.
> >
> > This has been asked several times in the past.
> > Usually it's been pointed out that it's a poor idea; since it's 
backwards of
> > the Unix philosophy that 'no news is good news', which is based on the 
fact
> > that it's really hard to notice the *absence* of something.
> 
> Unless your mailing system on the backup host broke down while the 
> backups are failing, too.
> 
> Or you want to graph some stats etc.

A daily e-mail is *not* the right tool for either of those jobs:  status 
monitoring or statistics.  That's what active monitoring systems and data 
logging systems (Nagios, Cacti, etc.) are for.  Such tools can connect 
directly to the server and pull whatever information you want them to, 
nearly continuously.

People who are used to getting such daily e-mails think that living 
without them is impossible;  however, once you have an actual monitoring 
system, you will never want to go back.  Like has been said, one of two 
things will happen:  either you will simply begin to ignore the daily 
e-mails (in which case they're useless), or you will have the discipline 
to open every one of those e-mails.  In which case, you have the 
discipline to open the BackupPC webpage every day!  :)

But again, a system like Nagios is invaluable for this type of thing.

Timothy J. Massey