Website backup monitoring and verification across client sites

Backups are the retainer work nobody thinks about until something goes wrong.

Your agency runs nightly backups across 40 client sites. The backup tool runs silently in the background. When everything works, nobody notices. When a backup silently fails for three weeks and then the client’s database corrupts — everyone notices.

The Backups channel captures backup events — completions, failures, restore verifications, storage alerts — and surfaces them in the client’s operational timeline. A failed backup isn’t buried in a tool’s notification email. It appears in the timeline alongside deploys, form submissions, and monitoring signals.

What the Backups channel captures

Backup lifecycle: Backup scheduled, backup started, backup completed, backup failed. Each event includes metadata — backup type (database, files, full), size, duration, storage destination.

Restore events: Restore initiated, restore verified. When your team tests a restore as part of a disaster recovery drill, the verification event appears in the timeline.

Storage signals: Storage threshold warnings, retention policy cleanups, destination availability checks. When a backup destination approaches capacity limits, the signal appears before backups start failing.

The invisible safety net

Backup health is one of the most underreported aspects of maintenance retainers. The monthly report says “backups running.” But is that true? Did the backup on March 14th actually succeed? Is the retention policy keeping 30 days of history? Is the storage destination accessible?

Without the Backups channel, answering those questions means logging into the backup tool, checking per-site status, and trusting that the tool’s own alerting works. With the Backups channel, backup events are part of the client timeline — visible, auditable, and reportable.

Integrations that feed this channel

• SnapShooter: Backup completion events, restore verifications, storage signals
• Custom backup solutions: Send events from UpdraftPlus, BlogVault, custom scripts, or any backup tool through the Burrow API

How agencies use the Backups channel

Backup health monitoring: Failed backups appear in the client timeline. Scout flags patterns — three consecutive failures, storage threshold approaching, retention gaps.

Retainer reporting: Monthly digests include: “30 nightly backups completed successfully. Average backup size: 2.1GB. Retention: 30 days.” The work that nobody thinks about becomes visible.

Compliance and audit: The backup event trail is an audit log. When a client asks “do we have backups from March 7th?” the timeline has the answer.

Maintenance reporting | Site monitoring use case | Agency operations | CMS version tracking