Feature Request: Activity or status information's about all snapshot profiles (in machine readable JSON format)

[buhtz]

This was on my own todo-List but I am far away from implementing this myself. So just for documentation (not for hurring it up!) I describe this feature here.

The problem
I don't know if my BackInTime (BIT) does a backup job or not even I don't know when it did it.

From time to time I open BIT and open each profile and checking the left list-view with the snapshot dates. Also for this I have to boot my backup-NAS because BIT won't show my anything without a backup destination available.

Solution
I want to aks BIT with one click or one command about the last successfull backup of all exiting jobs. There could be a .get_last_snapshot_dates() resulting in this

{'music_backup': time_struct<>,
 'other_backup_profile': time_struct<>}

This could be used by another methode pretty printing it to stdout (for command-line access) or by the GUI or by the plugin-API. There could be plugins showing the result in systray or sending an email about it or generating an RSS feed or make a robot dance the result.

[buhtz]

@emtiu My first impulse was to ask for "still relevant?" and tag this. Then I saw my own face. 😆

This feature is still in my mind. Just do something like backintime --status and BIT gives you (in json format!) the last dates for each snapshot profile and maybe some more information. You can write your own daily running checker script just to check if one of the profiles get outdated because of unknown and uncaught errors.

Tag: Feature

[buhtz]

This feature give users the opportunity to ask BIT (on command line) about the status of all existing profiles in a machine readable way. This can be used in (e.g. via cron executed) scripts to monitor BIT and start something (e.g. send mail or flash a big red light) when something is wrong.

[aryoda]

This feature request looks similar to "log aggregator" functionality.

I think a centralized summary of all result states is very helpful.

Still it requires a functionality in BiT (or outside) to inform the user based on this file and this currently the pain point IMHO.

We have user-callback scripts for that to trigger actions per snapshot directly to

1. send emails in case of problems (I don't like emails for privacy reasons if they contain paths and file names):
   https://github.com/bit-team/user-callback/blob/master/user-callback.sendmail

2. send a desktop notification (works only on desktop systems I guess):
   https://github.com/bit-team/user-callback/blob/master/user-callback.notify

We could "lift" this functionality into a BiT config + GUI for normal users but configuring a sendmail or smtp profile could be overkill.