A separate thread which mentioned some issues with backups in Fremont reminded me of something I keep meaning to ask for. While I periodically peek at the backup status for the nodes for which I have it enabled, I always feel a little exposed that if it were to stop working, I might not notice for a while.

Would it be possible to add an email notification type for backup job status transitions (for example, if it changed from successful to failed or back from failed to successful)?

-- David

+1

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I assumed this would be included already! Yes please.

Agreed. I have created three separate support tickets in the past two weeks each time that the backups have failed. It's nice that the backup status is on the main dashboard, but I shouldn't have to login to the dashboard to find out something as critical as this has failed.

Linode has useful alerts for CPU, io, etc. I'd like to see three more alerts set up:

1) Disk space on image specified reaching a % limit (yes, that means looking into the VM, but I know they can do that)

2) Backups that have failed

3) A number (x) of failed attempts at logging into the dashboard itself

I've been told the Fremont datacenter will be back with solid backups on Monday. This seems to be limited to Fremont, which points to some sort of hardware failure.

Thanks,
bruce

+10

Geez I didn't even realize how un-reliable the backups were in Fremont recently until I saw this thread and decided to go see what the status of mine are.

Most of mine recently have failed. Just tried a snapshot, that failed.

Some of us just don't log into the dashboard every day.

Well, it's technically Monday, and my backups just failed. Again. Five days in a row now. People, if this backup service is valuable to you, you need to speak up and put some pressure on Linode to get this FIXED. I love Linode in every way shape and form, but no backups? I mean, this is the kind of stuff that ends up on the front page of cnn.com when failures occur...

thanks,
bruce

I've been having problems for weeks in Fremont. I'm not personally worried, but I understand some people would be quite pissed. I'm actually curious as to whether or not they're going to pro-rate some free backup days to everyone in Fremont once they have apparently mined, refined, and molded the materials/parts required to build a modern computer to replace failed hardware.

Agreed. They've missed several marks on their recovery. Monday (yesterday) everything was supposed to be working fine, but it has continued to fail day after day.

What puzzles me is why this isn't happening at the other DC's. I mean, if this is just a failed piece of hardware, replace it. If needed, pick something from a working DC.

Or, is there something more complex going on here? Something that could have downstream implications? Hmmm...

(thinking...)

thanks,
bruce

I wonder how many people think their data is being backed up, and don't realise there has been a problem for the last two weeks, and their backups may have silently failed.

Well, it was short lived.

I heard in another forum that backups were working again, so I tried a snapshot last night. The good news is that the snapshot appears to have worked, and I'm happy about that.

The bad news is that the automated backups failed again. Hasn't had a successful automated backup in 10 days. Witness:

auto 2011-06-22 23:11:34 2011-06-22 23:11:35 1 second failed Unable to get backup lock.

It is what it is, I suppose.

thanks,
bruce