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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?

THanks for any comment.

Hi,

Run rdiff-backup from a script and log the results and then check the log is one way.
Now that I think of it cron may already be doing the above.
Or run rdiff-backup via backupninja and get the results emailed to you.

Cheers
Gavin

Mozafar Roshany 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?

THanks for any comment.


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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:-

MAILTO=gavin < at > wherever.gavin,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



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Mozafar Roshany schrieb:
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?

Having two current_mirror files means that the last session was aborted.
But: Having only one current_mirror does not neccessarily mean that
everything went well. When rdiff-backup fails to write to the
destination or crashes early (out of memory or something) you would not
notice.

Looking if there was any output is a good idea, an other option is to
check the return code of rdiff-backup (from the man page):

EXIT STATUS
If rdiff-backup finishes successfully, the exit status will be 0. If
there is an unrecoverable (critical) error, it will be non-zero (usu‐
ally 1, but don't depend on this specific value). When setting up
rdiff-backup to run automatically (as from cron( or similar) it is
probably a good idea to check the exit code.



Jakob


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