Any Way to Monitor Time Machine Backup Status and Alert upon Failure?

[#1]

Help Please. Hello people smarter than me;-) We use External Hard drives and time machine to back up our users data. Does anyone know of a way to get the computers to record the status of time machine back ups and notify me if a backup fails or a user has not backed up in a while. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
J. Griffin Stewart

[jarednichols]

With a little googling, I found TMS ( http://fernlightning.com/doku.php?id=software:misc:tms) You may be able to distribute that to your client computers and whip up some scripting to return statuses to you.

j

[#3]

Hello,

Help Please. Hello people smarter than me;-) We use External Hard drives and time machine to back up our users data. Does anyone know of a way to get the computers to record the status of time machine back ups and notify me if a backup fails or a user has not backed up in a while. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Check /var/db/.TimeMachine.Results.plist, should have the details you're after. For the full logs you'd need access to the back up hard drive I think, but the Results.plist should be enough to find out if the backup worked or if the user isn't backing up in a while/ever.

Philip

[ksanborn]

We are looking for the same thing, as J. Griffin Stewart. We would like an e-mail to be sent to a specific team if the backup fails.

[Chris_Hafner]

I haven't gone really in depth on this. however, there are a number of EAs here on the nation that will report the date and time of the last TM backup. I'll post an example below. You could create all different types of smart groups to email you based on things like x number of days since, etc.

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=8814
and
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=13289

That said, this doesn't answer your specific question which relates to failure states. Hopefully someone knows where that's logged out and easily grabbed across OSs.

[jameskirsop]

FWIW, updated information is available in this thread: https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/13289/time-machine-extension-attribute-compatible-with-... which didn't show up in the first set of results under meaningful search terms.