Configuring Duplicati email notifications is a simple way to ensure that you are informed when your computer gets backed up and whether that backup is successful or not. No one wants backup failures go unnoticed. After all, what good is having a backup that doesn’t work? Especially if you need it to recover data! If you’ve not already checked out our other post on setting up a backup with Duplicati, please do so.
Email notifications are important to because they help you catch these cases:
Success: This one is actually more important than many people think. This notification lets you know that backups that were scheduled actually occurred, that they were successful, and that the email notifications are working.
Warning: This lets you know that there was a non-fatal/error that occurred during the backup run. While not as critical as Failure/Fatal it indicates that some files may not have been backed up.
Failure/Fatal: The backup job did not complete. Often people only set this notification up to keep from spamming their email box and while this one is very important, it’s not the only one that’s important.
Setting up Duplicati Email Notifications
Sign into Duplicati and click on the Settings Menu
Scroll down to the bottom and under Default Options, click “Edit As List”
Enter the following in the box that comes up. You may have to change these depending on your email provider.
--send-mail-any-operation=true
--send-mail-body=%RESULT%
--send-mail-level=all
--send-mail-subject=Duplicati %OPERATIONNAME% report for %backup-name%
--send-mail-to=<your email address>
--send-http-result-output-format=Duplicati
--send-mail-url=smtp://<your mail server>:<your mail server port number>/?starttls=when-available
--send-mail-username=<mail server account>
--send-mail-password=<mail server account password>When finished, click the OK button.
Testing
When you’ve finished setting this up, the easiest way to test your Duplicati email notifications is to actually run a backup. When that backup is complete you should see the email notification in your mailbox. It will look something like this.
DeletedFiles: 0
DeletedFolders: 0
ModifiedFiles: 0
ExaminedFiles: 20
OpenedFiles: 0
AddedFiles: 0
SizeOfModifiedFiles: 0
SizeOfAddedFiles: 0
SizeOfExaminedFiles: 259597942
SizeOfOpenedFiles: 0
NotProcessedFiles: 0
AddedFolders: 0
TooLargeFiles: 0
FilesWithError: 0
ModifiedFolders: 0
ModifiedSymlinks: 0
AddedSymlinks: 0
DeletedSymlinks: 0
PartialBackup: False
Dryrun: False
MainOperation: Backup
ParsedResult: Success
Version: 2.0.5.1 (2.0.5.1_beta_2020-01-18)
EndTime: 3/11/2021 12:46:47 PM (1615492007)
BeginTime: 3/11/2021 12:46:44 PM (1615492004)
Duration: 00:00:03.3727141
MessagesActualLength: 12
WarningsActualLength: 0
ErrorsActualLength: 0
LimitedMessages: []
LimitedWarnings: []
LimitedErrors: []The most important parts of this message are:
- You received it!
- The backup was successful: ParsedResult: Success
- No errors or warnings
Check out more of our How-To’s for additional great tips like this one.