{"id":1764,"date":"2013-04-10T12:15:16","date_gmt":"2013-04-10T12:15:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/?p=1764"},"modified":"2019-11-13T05:46:25","modified_gmt":"2019-11-13T05:46:25","slug":"backup-and-disaster-recovery-planning-understanding-reporting-and-testing-notifications-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/backup-and-disaster-recovery-planning-understanding-reporting-and-testing-notifications-2","title":{"rendered":"Backup and Disaster Recovery Planning: Understanding reporting and testing notifications"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image via Pixar<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I heard this story about Pixar a few years ago: in the middle of making Toy Story 2 one of the coders accidentally ran a command which began deleting chunks of the movie and it wouldn’t stop until there was nothing left.<\/p>\n

First Woody disappears. Then Buzz. Then Rex. Within a few seconds all of the characters were gone, irreparably wiped from the server and now whole scenes were erasing before their eyes.<\/p>\n

Why you should test your notifications<\/h2>\n

In this series of three articles we\u2019re going to share the best way to protect your systems and data while following the guys at Pixar as they try and resurrect Toy Story 2. Our first article is all about making sure that your notifications are set up right and working.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s good to know what is happening in your server room. You wouldn’t want to be thinking everything was A-okay when in fact your server is being systematically stripped of years of man-hours of work and millions of dollars of data. That\u2019s why notifications are important.<\/p>\n

They are your email friends, reassuring you that everything is working smoothly and importantly telling you if or when something\u2019s going wrong. As with all of your critical systems it helps if you test your email notifications before you need them.<\/p>\n

Testing Email Notifications<\/h2>\n

In BackupAssist reports are created each time you backup or restore. The email notifications you receive are rehashed versions of these internal reports. You don\u2019t need to set anything up to keep getting reports within BackupAssist.<\/p>\n

If you do have email notifications set up then here\u2019s how you can check they are working:<\/p>\n