Most backup problems are not found by an alarm. They are found on the day someone needs a file back. On a ship this usually means the NAS has been quietly doing nothing for weeks, and nobody noticed because nobody received a message.
Step 1: make DSM able to send e-mail
In DSM, open Control Panel > Notification > Email and set up the SMTP server. If direct SMTP to the internet is not allowed on board, use the relay the ship's mail system already uses. Send a test message, and check that it really arrives ashore.
Then, on the Rules tab of the same page (Advanced on older DSM versions), check which events send an e-mail and make sure the Hyper Backup ones are ticked.
Step 2: set up the Hyper Backup task properly
- In the task settings, tick Enable task notification.
- Tick Enable integrity check schedule. The integrity check looks for corrupted backup data, not only whether the job ran.
- Tick Enable backup rotation and keep several versions (Smart Recycle keeps hourly, daily and weekly versions), so a backup of already encrypted files does not replace the last good version.
- Restore a file now and then. A test restore is the only proof that the backup works.
What these alerts do not tell you
A backup that never ran. DSM tells you when a task fails. A task that was paused, a NAS that was off at the scheduled time, or a schedule disabled during maintenance does not always produce a failure message. Silence looks the same as success.
A backup that ran but is wrong. A job can report success after writing one log file instead of a 30 GB archive, or after copying files that were already encrypted by ransomware. Status-based alerts do not compare a run with the previous ones.
Backups written by other software. Veeam, Windows Server Backup, Acronis, robocopy or rsync jobs that write into a shared folder on the NAS are invisible to DSM's backup reporting.
The person reading the e-mail. On a ship the IT officer changes every few months. Alerts that go to one personal address stop being read the day that person signs off.
Turn it around: expect a confirmation
The reliable rule is the opposite of "alert me when something fails": a confirmed backup must arrive for each source by a deadline, for example every day by 06:00, and an alarm goes out when it does not. A missing backup then becomes as loud as a failed one. Send the alarms to a shared address (the ship's IT mailbox and the office), not to a person.
For folders where other software writes, the newest file in the folder is the evidence of the last backup. Compare its size and file count with the usual values for that day of the week; a run at a fraction of the normal size deserves a look even if the job said success.
Doing it with BackupPilot
BackupPilot for Synology NAS does exactly this from one Windows PC, read-only and without a cloud service. It sets a deadline per backup source (Hyper Backup, Active Backup for Business, Snapshot Replication and watched folders for third-party software), compares every run with the history of that folder, and raises an alarm by sound and e-mail when a backup is missing or looks wrong. See all the checks.
All shipboard IT guides · Razvan Malciu, shipboard IT officer