Comment 7 for bug 409005

Hi Germar,

It's not even the email notifications which are the core of the problem - those can be wrapped around the backintime script. The heart of the problem is that when backintime fails catastrophically (no backup created at all, for example), it still exits with a zero exit code. This is just Bad.

In common/backintime.py, in the start_app function, we see code like:

        if arg == '--backup' or arg == '-b':
            take_snapshot( cfg, True )
            sys.exit(0)

Instead, if it were something like:

        if arg == '--backup' or arg == '-b':
            ret = take_snapshot( cfg, True )
            sys.exit(ret)

(or perhaps more sophisticated than this), and take_snapshot were tweaked to return a code indicating whether the snapshot succeeded or whether there were minor or serious errors, it would be automatic for cron to warn that there was a failed job.

HTH! Thanks,

   Julian