[rdiff-backup-users] Re: Find out Failed Backup

[Chris G]

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 09:50:39AM +1000, Gavin wrote:
>      Hi all
> 
>      I back up a directory to a remote system by rdiff-backup and I'm doing
>      it as periodic cron jobs. How can I find out that a back-up session
>      failed? I saw an entry at the FAQ that told about two
>      current_mirror_XXXX files with different dates. Is it enough to check
>      this situation?
> 
Any output (i.e. an error or warning) from rdiff-backup will be
E-Mailed by cron to the owner of the cron job.  So, if rdiff-backup
runs totally successfully you will get no output, if it fails you will
get an error message.

If the owner of the cron job isn't a user who reads mail then you can
set the environment variable MAILTO in the crontab to send the mail
where you want, i.e. add a line like the following to your crontab:-

    address@hidden,reads.mail

If you want to get confirmation that the crontab has been run then you
can put simple 'echo' lines in the script that runs rdiff-backup. They
will then appear as mail sent to the above MAILTO user.

(All the above applies to cron on modern Linux, if your rdiff-backup
is running on something else then read the man pages for cron and
crontab to confirm it's the same)

-- 
Chris Green