# Watch a nightly backup job

> Report a cron'd restic, borg or rsync backup's start, success, failure and log tail through a heartbeat monitor.

Web page: https://infrainbox.app/docs/cookbook/backup-job/

**You'll get:** an incident the moment a nightly backup fails, with the job's own output attached, and automatic resolution the next time it succeeds.

## Before you start

Create a heartbeat monitor for this job (see [Heartbeat monitors](https://infrainbox.app/docs/sources/heartbeats.md)), with its expected interval matching your schedule (daily, for a nightly job) and a grace period generous enough to cover a slow run. Copy the monitor's key, `iik_hb_…`.

## 1. Wrap the backup command

A heartbeat's URL takes the job's exit status as its last path segment — `0` for success, `1`–`255` for a failure, or the word `fail` if you'd rather not deal with numbers. Since a shell exit code is already 0–255, you can pass it straight through:

```bash
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# backup-with-heartbeat.sh
set -uo pipefail
HEARTBEAT_URL="https://infrainbox.example.com/v1/heartbeats/iik_hb_XXXXXXXXXXXX"

output="$(/usr/local/bin/run-backup.sh 2>&1)"
code=$?

curl -fsS -m 10 --data-binary "$output" "$HEARTBEAT_URL/$code" >/dev/null

exit "$code"
```

A non-zero code opens or continues the monitor's incident, with `$output` (up to 16 KiB) attached as the incident's detail — exactly what you'd want to read at 7 a.m. A `0` is a plain success, same as pinging the bare `HEARTBEAT_URL` with no code at all.

## 2. Point your scheduler at the wrapper

```cron
0 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup-with-heartbeat.sh
```

## If you already use restic, borgmatic or rsync

- **restic:** wrap it exactly as above — a plain `restic backup …` already exits non-zero on failure.
- **borgmatic:** it already knows how to ping a Healthchecks-style URL from its own hooks (check your version's `healthchecks:`/`ping_url` setting) — point that straight at your monitor's URL. Borgmatic also pings `/start` and `/log` by default; InfraInbox accepts both and currently just ignores them, so there's nothing extra to configure.
- **rsync:** rsync's own exit code covers most failures (a `2>&1 | tee` capture works the same way as the wrapper above); a full sync that partially fails but still exits `0` won't be caught this way, so check its output for `rsync error:` lines if that matters to you.

## Check it works

- After a normal night, the monitor reads **Up**.
- Force a failure (point the job at a bad path, or just `exit 1` in a test copy of the script) and confirm an incident opens with the captured output visible on it.
- Fix it and run the wrapper again: the incident resolves on its own.