TKLBAM - email notification on failed backup

[JedMeister]

A long term TurnKey/TKLBAM user asked

Is there a way through TKLBAM, or possible even Duplicity, to have the system send an email if there was an error during the backup process?

I forwarded the question to @lirazsiri (the TKLBAM Daddy), here's his response:

1. There is currently no support for this within TKLBAM or Duplicity but you could do this by wrapping around tklbam-backup, so it emails the output log if it errors out. Something like this::

    TMPOUT=$(mktemp)
    (tklbam-backup 2>&1) > $TMPOUT && cat $TMPOUT || \
        (cat $TMPOUT | mail -s "tklbam-backup error" user@example.com)
    rm $TMPOUT

If you don't want the whole backup log you could use tail instead of cat.

2. The place to add support for this inside TKLBAM would be as a hook that runs when you have an exception. Right now the backup hook has the following states:
   • pre
   • inspect
   • post

If we added 'error' then you could write a hook that sends an e-mail when the backup errors out. The backup code is already inside a try clause so you'd just have to modify the exception handler to launch.

If he doesn't like the shell solution, here's an untested patch::

    diff --git a/cmd_backup.py b/cmd_backup.py
    index 0b5fa36..d11702a 100755
    --- a/cmd_backup.py
    +++ b/cmd_backup.py
    @@ -476,6 +476,8 @@ def main():
                 print >> log_fh
                 traceback.print_exc(file=log_fh)
         +        hooks.backup.error()
    +
             raise
              finally:
    diff --git a/hooks.py b/hooks.py
    index 22eb9a2..5f85ed8 100644
    --- a/hooks.py
    +++ b/hooks.py
    @@ -80,6 +80,9 @@ class Hooks:
         def post(self):
             self._run("post")
         +    def error(self):
    +        self._run("error")
    +
         def inspect(self, extras_path):
             orig_cwd = os.getcwd()