Borg Consciousness

Assimilate yourself with your Borg backups; perceive their silent deaths.

This little bash script queries a repo to see when the last successful backup took place. It alerts you if one hasn't run for a while. It uses healthchecks.io for alerts, so you can get emails/Telgram messages/tweets/whatever. If you want, you can easily substitute a different alert service - borg-consciousness.sh just sends http requests.

borg-consciousness.sh sends a heartbeat if a recent backup is detected so, even if borg-consciousness.sh itself fails, you'll hear about it.

You can run borg-consciousness.sh from anywhere without modifying it. I run it on a cloud VM, hostA, which queries rsync.net server hostB to ensure regular backups are coming in from laptopC and hostA. To check multiple backup repos, just copy the script and point each copy at a different repo. It would be just as safe to run it on the same machine whose backups you're interested in monitoring, because of the heartbeat mechanism.

Usage

• Edit the redacted markers to point the script at your repo.
• Edit the heartbeat_url and fail_url to point to your alert service (Register an account on healthchecks.io).
• You can adjust the "danger threshold" with n_days. By default it will alert you if no backups have happened for 3 days.
• Put the script somewhere sensible, and call it with cron. I put a symlink in /etc/cron.daily
• Test it - set the make_it_fail variable to simulate an old backup and receive an alert.
• Relax in the knowledge that if your backups fail, you'll hear about it.

Dependencies

• curl