Monitoring Backup Storage

It is important to keep an eye on your backup storage so that what you backup is restorable. Typically monitoring of your storage will consist of two or more important aspects. The first and probably the most important aspect is connecting and maintaining the storage to your computer in such a way that it going to remain reliable, this is going to include keeping the humidity, temperature and power stable for your storage system(s). The second aspect is monitoring the storage regularly to ensure it is working as expected. Beyond performing restores; this is going to include checking the file systems and scrubbing the drives.

You should note that some file systems, storage devices, the rsync checksum options, operating systems and even custom LBackup scripts offer checksum systems which are able to aid you in detecting issues with your backup storage systems.

One of the best tools to accomplish automated monitoring of your storage volumes on Mac OS X is DriveGenius by Prosoft Engineering. This tool has a feature called DrivePulse which is able to check for various issues on DAS (directly attached storage) systems.

Lucid offers an open source wrapper script to diskutil (Mac OS X only) called volume-check. This tool is able to be scheduled to run and check your DAS (directly attached storage) volumes for file system errors. If you add a wrapper script to volume-check then it is quick to setup a scheduled report regarding the state of your DAS (directly attached storage) systems.

For your convenience, an example volume-check wrapper script which uses SendEmail is included below for quick reference. If you decide to use this example script, it will need to be modified to meet your requirements.

#!/bin/bash

# Copyright 2014 Henri Shustak
# Licence : GNU v3 or later <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>
# Lucid Information Systems <http://www.lucidsystems.org>
# Example wrapper script to volume_check.rb <http://www.lucid.technology/tools/volume-check>

# This script will only send emails if issues are detected.
# Of course you may edit the script to meet your requirements.
# Lucid is available to assist you as required.

# Requirements :
 # (1) volume_check.rb must be in the same directory as this script
 # (2) sendEmail must be installed at the following path /usr/local/sbin/sendEmail
 #     sendEmail may be downloaded via the following from <http://www.lucid.technology/tools/send-email> 

# move to parent directory
cd "`dirname ${0}`"
volume_check_log="/tmp/volume_check.log"

./volume_check.rb "${volume_check_log}"
if [ $? != 0 ] ; then
	/usr/local/sbin/sendEmail -m "Volume check summary is attached for your reference.\n\n" -f from@yourdomain.com -t to@yourdomain.com -u "Volume Check Summary : Error(s) Detected" -a "${volume_check_log}" -s yoursmtp_server.com:port_number -xu your_username@yourdomain.com -xp password
	rm "${volume_check_log}"
	exit $?
fi

exit 0