Blog
Backup monitoring, in practice.
How to know your backups ran, for MSPs and IT teams. Useful whichever tool you use; where BackupSentinel comes in, we say so.
Writing a parsing rule for software without a built-in rule
What a backup report email must contain, matching its subject, why failed beats warning beats OK, the "0 errors" trap, and keeping regexes safe.
Running a backup wallboard in the office
What goes on a backup wall screen, how big it should be, how to make a frozen screen obvious, which account it signs in with, and who can see it.
Monthly backup reports clients actually read
What a monthly backup report should show, why missing reports sit next to the success rate, how to explain incidents plainly, and links versus attachments.
Small backups are suspicious
A backup that reports success but wrote half its usual size may have lost part of its selection. Why to use a median, and how to handle expected drops.
Monitoring Veeam, Synology and Proxmox backup emails across many clients
What Veeam, Synology and Proxmox send, when one address per client is enough and when each job needs its own, naming that keeps reports matched, and how to verify the first report.
Backup alerts technicians don't mute
One alert per job, two severities, escalation in place, recovery notices, quiet hours for warnings only, caps for flapping jobs and routing per client: how to keep backup alerts read.
RPO, grace windows and when a backup is really late
Interval or schedule, why counting from the last report is predictable, grace worked through for hourly to monthly jobs, weekday-only and long-running jobs, and the limits of the method.
A backup can fail by saying nothing
A failed backup sends an email that says so. A backup that stopped running sends nothing, and nothing looks exactly like a quiet good night. How to make silence visible.