[pquerna]

One way to think about your fear is, shouldn't that just be a tarsnap feature?

Add some metadata for a machine that tarsnap should expect a once a day/week/month backup from this machine, and if it doesn't get one, to send you an email?

[patio11]

whistles

Until the day when Colin considers it in-scope for Tarsnap, I recommend Deadman's Snitch for this purpose. I literally spend more on DMS to monitor Tarsnap than I spend on Tarsnap. No, I don't think that is just, either.

[RexM]

For those interested in patio11's thoughts on how he would run tarsnap http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/

And the discussion on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953

[dlgeek]

Did Colin ever reply to that? I've always wondered what his response was.

[snowwrestler]

In this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9496561

[ma2rten]

He did just now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cperciva

[ploxiln]

Don't you have some other servers running other services? So you must already have some monitoring and alerting system like Nagios, to which you can add one more little "passive check" that does the same thing, for no incremental cost?

[patio11]

I have roughly fourish separate monitoring systems for Appointment Reminder. DMS is the one which is least tied to me, so I use it for Tarsnap (the most critical thing about AR that can fail "quietly") and as the fourthish line of defense for the core AR functionality.

(This may be slightly overbuilt, but I felt it justified to get peace of mind, given AR's fair degree of importance to customers/myself and the enterprise-y customer base. In particular, I would not have been happy with any monitoring solution which would fail if I lost network connectivity at the data center.)

$15 a month is far below my care floor for making sure that my backups are working and that I do not get sued into bits.

[ploxiln]

Touché :)

[StavrosK]

I'll second it (https://deadmanssnitch.com/). It's such a useful tool, it's saved my bacon more than once.