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Backup Activity Reporting - Retrospect OSX 10.0.1 (105)


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What are people using for backup activity reporting, analysis, and auditing? Unless I am missing some configuration somewhere the status emails and logs for reviewing backups are terribly inadequate especially for auditing.

 

Running OSX 10.0.1 Retrospect Multi server version on one OSX server and backing up Windows 2003 server, 2 Windows 2008 servers, and 2 OSX servers.

 

Due to temp files, caches, etc not getting backed up all my scripts always complete flagged with the red x for error. The email I get simply states "completed with 123 errors" or something like that. Go to look at the log inside Retrospect and is just a simple text log, and its truncated due to the length of it I guess. Its like this logging is right out of 1995 or something.

  1. How do any of you pass audits with this kind of reporting?
  2. Why doesn't the email list the source, the file, the error in it? Have it selectable if you need to, Detail or Summary.
  3. Why aren't the log files easily findable? Put them under /Var/Log where they belong
  4. How about XML format logs that we can import into say Excel and make real use of?

 

Is anyone doing any script processing of the logs to make them useful? I'd really like to know my backups are working and so would our auditor.

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Due to temp files, caches, etc not getting backed up all my scripts always complete flagged with the red x for error.

Don't you use the filter "All files except cache files"? Then you should.

If that doesn't cut it, make a duplicate and fine tune it to avoid backing up the files that can't be read anyway.

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Nope, I use all files and then want to tune it manually. Too many times vendors make bad choices on what to exclude automatically for their user's benefit. Look at Time Machine by apple. It excludes so many critical items from the backups it should be fined.

 

The problem is getting the list of files that are in error to tune it with. I do individual backups to NAS so I will work down those lists assuming they are the same, The 'all in one' backup goes to hard drives that go offsite daily for disaster recovery. Shame the window's clients are NOT doing bare-metal backups but thats another whine for another time.

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I can see the rules fine and I'll be using them to filter out whats being backed up to remove files that are failing for being open and things I don't need like the temp folders. I'm still stuck with my original issue though which is how do people audit their backup logs? Is copying and pasting from the log window the only way to get a log for analysis?

 

For example, I may not care that a log file that was backed up doesn't compare because, well, its a log file and may be getting updated, but I may still want it backed up if I am trying to make sure I can recovery my server if necessary especially if I need to research something to se if something was being reported before the server crashed. I don't care if the error in the backup log is "failed compare", but I do care if its "unable to open".

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During the years of Retrospect usage we kept adding exceptions to our own filter. For all errors, we just check the log manually, every day. If that would work for you depends on the amount of machines you need to backup. It's something we just do every day. We do not use the email notifications for that. With those one can only see a bit in advance if there were many problems or not. Just log into the backup server and check the log.

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