How do I know a backup run failed without logging in daily?
Good backup tools can email or webhook on every run. The trick: have them warn on 'no run', not just on failures.
Try this first
- 1Turn off success mails if you do not have time to read them. Only enable failure mails. Otherwise it all goes to 'deleted' and you miss the failures too.
- 2More important than failure mails: a 'no run since X days' alert. Otherwise you do not learn your backup server itself is off.
- 3Send alerts to at least two mailboxes, not one person. Holidays and illness must not mean three weeks of backup silence.
- 4For advanced: hook into a monitoring platform (Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, your own ticketing). With heartbeat checks confirming runs actually happen.
When to bring us in
We roll out monitoring for backup platforms, with alerts going to our NOC for clients on a service contract. No alerts sounds like no work, but it means the system is not working either.
See also
- We have backups but we do not know if they workA backup that cannot be restored is not a backup. Testing matters as much as taking the backup.
- Suspected ransomware: what to do RIGHT NOWThe first 30 minutes are critical. One wrong move spreads the damage. Read before acting.
- Someone accidentally deleted an important folderUsually fine to recover. The trick: do not save anything new on that drive until you know how.
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