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Comment by rwbhn | Hacker News Reader

Monitor that the newest backup is less than N hours old.

Alternatively, if you bother to have proper exit codes for your backup scripts, you could verify exit != 0, and alert on that.

I have cron on all of my systems email STDERR to me, STDOUT is redirected to the normal logs.

One you clean up your crons, you really only get email once a month or so when something breaks.

Do you use something like http://habilis.net/cronic/ ?

Nope, just instead of this

    0 1 * * * backup >/var/log/foo 2>&1

I do this

    0 1 * * * backup >/var/log/foo

My errors are emailed to me via standard cron conventions. Normal logging is available for me if I care to look at it.