🚨 How to monitor your backups

Having backups is great, but they won't do you a lot of good unless you have confidence that they're running on a regular basis. That's where monitoring and alerting comes in.

There are several different ways you can monitor your backups and find out whether they're succeeding. Which of these you choose to do is up to you and your particular infrastructure:

• Job runner alerts: The easiest place to start is with failure alerts from the scheduled job runner (cron, systemd, etc.) that's running borgmatic. But note that if the job doesn't even get scheduled (e.g. due to the job runner not running), you probably won't get an alert at all! Still, this is a decent first line of defense, especially when combined with some of the other approaches below.
• Third-party monitoring services: borgmatic integrates with these monitoring services and libraries, pinging them as backups happen. The idea is that you'll receive an alert when something goes wrong or when the service doesn't hear from borgmatic for a configured interval (if supported). While these services and libraries offer different features, you probably only need to use one of them at most. See the monitoring configuration documentation for details.
• Third-party monitoring software: You can use traditional monitoring software to consume borgmatic JSON output and track when the last successful backup occurred. See scripting borgmatic below for how to configure this.
• Borg hosting providers: Some Borg hosting providers include monitoring and alerting as part of their offering. This gives you a dashboard to check on all of your backups, and can alert you if the service doesn't hear from borgmatic for a configured interval.
• Consistency checks: While not strictly part of monitoring, if you want confidence that your backups are not only running but are restorable as well, you can configure particular consistency checks or even script full extract tests.
• Commands run on error: borgmatic's command hooks support running arbitrary commands or scripts when borgmatic itself encounters an error running your backups. So for instance, you can run a script to send yourself a text message alert. But note that if borgmatic doesn't actually run, this alert won't fire. See the documentation on preparation and cleanup steps for details.

Scripting borgmatic

To consume the output of borgmatic in other software, you can include an optional --json flag with create, repo-list, repo-info, or info to get the output formatted as JSON.

Note that when you specify the --json flag, Borg's other non-JSON output is suppressed so as not to interfere with the captured JSON. Also note that JSON output only shows up at the console and not in syslog.

Latest backups

All borgmatic actions that accept an --archive flag allow you to specify an archive name of latest. This lets you get the latest archive without having to first run borgmatic repo-list manually, which can be handy in automated scripts. Here's an example:

borgmatic info --archive latest