Discussing e-mail updates change

[BjarniRunar]

Thanks @helgihg for the e-mail update fix! It's important.

Discussing 7a39e84

I noticed a few minor things:

1. In the 'echo' command near the end the $MSG is not quoted. Are we sure that's safe?

2. I object to sending e-mail on every successful backup. That's just spam which makes important e-mails more likely to get missed. Even if YOU are happy to work this way, I am not and from my understanding of human nature, I strongly feel this is not the right way to do this. The right way to do this is to have an actual monitoring system which aggregates all the different events we need to keep track of and summarizes. In my opinion, obviously! :)

Sending e-mails on failure is fine IMO, but still vastly inferior to integrating with a proper monitoring system. But until we have one of those, this is a huge improvement, so thanks!

[BjarniRunar]

See also #2 for a light-weight monitoring integration proposal.

[helgihg]

On 1. No, we're not sure this is safe. I've added double-quotes around it and pushed the changes to repo. Thanks for catching that.

On 2. I understand the point. My ambition was to do anything that would just get the darn thing monitored somehow, as quickly as possible. I don't have time to make it fancier, personally, but rather wanted to do the bare minimum.

I agree with you that a proper monitoring solution would be much better in every regard, but that's an entire project in its own right that I don't have time for. Rather, I suggested that those who don't want the success-emails filter them out specifically. I understand that it's a bit of a shitmix, but in light of us not having paid staff or any active volunteers beside myself at the moment, I just wanted something up and running that I knew would guarantee at least one person (myself) noticing if the backups begin to fail.

Seeing that you've added a new issue about the monitoring issue, I'd recommend closing this issue, because it's essentially a duplicate at this point.

[BjarniRunar]

OK. I don't care enough to go and remove the success e-mails... but I will as soon as there is monitoring in place. I'd say we leave this open as a TODO item until then.