BackupWatch Docs
ALERTS & EMAIL

Getting notified when a backup fails

BackupWatch emails your team when a backup fails, when one goes missing entirely, and — once a day — a summary of every active job. Who receives it and how it's sent both live on the Settings → Notifications tab.

Moved in v0.0.40. SMTP used to be its own settings tab. Outbound email is now a section on the Notifications tab, so recipients, alert toggles, the daily summary and delivery are configured in one place. Old #sec-smtp links still work — they open the Notifications tab.

Notifications

MSP recipients

Where failure and missed-backup alerts and the daily summary are sent — a comma- or newline-separated list of your team's inbox(es). With no recipients set, there is nobody to email and sending is skipped.

Immediate alerts

Two independent toggles: email immediately on failed backups, and email immediately on missed backups (a scheduled backup whose success email never arrived). Turn both off for a quieter summary-only setup — the daily summary still reports failures and missed backups.

Daily summary

One digest per day, at a time you choose, listing every active job's latest status. Two optional fields shape it: Organisation name appears at the top of the email, and Public app URL becomes the button that links staff back into BackupWatch. Leave either blank to omit it.

Health watchdog

A dead-man's switch: if BackupWatch can't poll the mailbox for the configured number of hours (a revoked Graph token, an expired Google grant, a mailbox password change), it emails the recipients once, and again when it recovers. This is what catches BackupWatch's own outages, not just the backups it's watching. Set it to 0 to turn it off.

Timezone

The zone used for job schedules, missed-backup windows, and the daily summary. Type to search any city/region (e.g. Australia/Melbourne) — named zones automatically adjust for daylight saving; a fixed UTC offset does not. Leave blank to use the server's local time.

Settings, Notifications panel: recipients, immediate alerts, daily summary, health watchdog and timezone
Settings → Notifications

Outbound email — two ways to send

Send notifications via chooses how the mail actually leaves.

OptionWhat it doesRequires
The connected mailbox Sends as the same account BackupWatch reads, so alerts come from the monitored address itself. No SMTP server or second password. Microsoft 365 (Graph), or Google connected with OAuth.
Separate SMTP server Sends through any SMTP relay you nominate. Host, port and credentials. The only option for generic IMAP mailboxes.

Sending via the connected mailbox

For Microsoft 365, add the Mail.Send application permission to the same Azure app registration you created for reading, and admin-consent it. Reading alone (Mail.ReadWrite) is not enough to send.

For Google, the existing Sign in with Google connection is used — nothing further to configure. An app-password Google setup cannot send this way; use SMTP.

Two reasons to prefer this over SMTP: alerts come from an address your team already trusts and can reply to, and it is unaffected by Microsoft disabling SMTP AUTH — the change that breaks a lot of MSP alerting. Mail the mailbox sends to itself is ignored automatically, so alerts can never loop back into the Review queue as if they were backup reports.
Outbound email panel with the connected mailbox selected and the SMTP fields hidden
With The connected mailbox selected, the SMTP server fields disappear. Your saved values are kept if you switch back.

Sending via a separate SMTP server

FieldNotes
Host / Port / User / PasswordYour outbound mail server's connection details.
FromThe address alerts appear to come from.
STARTTLSPort 587 usually needs this on. Port 465 always uses implicit TLS and ignores the box. Leave it off only for a LAN-only relay.

Secrets are encrypted at rest and never shown back — the password field reads "•••• stored" once set.

Outbound email panel with a separate SMTP server selected, showing host, port, user, password, from and STARTTLS
Settings → Notifications → Outbound email, SMTP fields shown.

Send a test email

Enter an address and click Send test email. It sends immediately using the values on screen, whether or not you've saved, and tests whichever delivery path is currently selected — so it exercises Graph or Gmail when the connected mailbox is chosen, and the relay when SMTP is chosen. It does not use your alert recipients.

Worth doing after any change to the mailbox connection, not just when first setting up. Alerting that silently stopped working is the failure mode this product exists to prevent.

What's next

NEXTClients & Jobs

Now that alerts have somewhere to go, add what they'll be alerting on.