Hi, If you don't currently take advantage of BitFolk's free backups service then the following doesn't apply to you. Two extra checks were added last night on the backups that BitFolk manages for you. All this info is going to go on a page I will create at https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Backups but you need to know it now. - Backup age This checks that your most recent successful¹ backup is not too old. The warning threshold is 2.5x the appropriate interval. So if your backups happen every 4 hours, you'll receive an alert if they are ever older than 10 hours. If your backups happen daily then you'll receive an alert if they are ever more than 60 hours old. And so on. This alerting replaces the manual process of me being sent excerpts of log files that say a customer's backups are failing, then opening a support ticket with the customer to make them aware. If you receive this alert then your backups are definitely not happening. The alert looks like this: From: nagios(a)bitfolk.com Subject: ** PROBLEM alert - backup0.bitfolk.com/Backup age youraccount is CRITICAL ** ***** Nagios ***** Notification Type: PROBLEM Service: Backup age youraccount Host: backup0.bitfolk.com Address: 85.119.80.240 State: CRITICAL Date/Time: Tue Jan 31 12:37:38 UTC 2012 Additional Info: FILE_AGE CRITICAL: /data/backup/rsnapshot.6-7-4-6/hourly.0/85.119.82.121 is 16842912 seconds old and 4096 bytes (Those who haven't had a successful backup run in the last couple of days will have a huge number of seconds listed there because the backup system was only modified to record last successful contact recently) - Backup space usage This checks that your total backup space usage is not approaching your current quota. The thresholds are 95% for a warning and 99% for a critical. This alerting replaces the manual process of me being warned about customers who are exceeding their quota and then opening support tickets with them to discuss what they want to do about it². If you receive this alert then your backups are still happening, but you're in danger of (or already are) using more than the agreed space. If you exceed your quota then we may disable your backups, so that would eventually cause the above backup age alert to fire. Please note that we can't update the measurement of how much space you're using very often. Backup directories contain hundreds of millions of files, many of which are copies of each other, but it's not possible to tell without looking. Adding it all up takes quite a long time and stresses disk IO quite badly. So we only update quotas every day at best at the moment. Also please note that since this is a backup system, deleting files on your VPS does not immediately result in using less disk space for backups. It would be a rather pointless backup system if it threw away deleted files immediately. :) Anything that gets backed up is going to be kept for as long as your chosen backup schedule dictates, e.g. 6 months by default. If you have blown your quota by accidentally allowing large amounts of data to be backed up, you are still going to have to contact support to get it deleted. The alert looks like this: From: nagios(a)bitfolk.com Subject: ** PROBLEM alert - backup2.bitfolk.com/Backup space usage youraccount is WARNING ** ***** Nagios ***** Notification Type: PROBLEM Service: Backup space usage youraccount Host: backup2.bitfolk.com Address: 85.119.80.230 State: WARNING Date/Time: Tue Jan 31 15:52:28 UTC 2012 Additional Info: WARNING 98.50% (394/400MiB) used It is possible for the usage to go above 100% because we do allow you to go over your quota for short periods of time. Cheers, Andy ¹ "Successful" as in, rsync connected to your host, did some stuff and then exited with a non-error exit code. It does not necessarily mean that what you think should be backed up is being backed up. As with any backup solution you need to assure yourself on a regular basis that it's doing what you expect. ² Generally one or more of: - Buy some more disk space for backups - Backup fewer files - Backup less often -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting _______________________________________________ announce mailing list announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce