[sclug] Spotting errors in a scheduled rsync job

[Tom Chance]

Hullo,

I'm using rsync (via Cygwin on a Win2k3 server) to backup data from a server at work to a network attached storage device. It's a nice, simple solution and I've got it running every night without any problems.

However, I want to make it easy to spot problems. The main ones I can think of are rsync just completely failing to run, getting halfway through a job and for some reason aborting, or not finding the destination folder. I don't want to have to dig through the output every day to spot problems. I also want it to be easy so my non-technical colleagues can spot issues when I'm on holiday.

Another scheduled task I have is just an scp operation to grab some remote data on a daily basis (a web site backup), and it's really simple to just email the results to a specified addrress if it works.

Does anyone know of any recipes or utilities to do this? I've had a bit of a dig around on the internet but so far I've come up blank.

Kind regards,
Tom