Vault Backup – Emailing the results

Posted on January 6, 2015 by Mark Lancaster, Synergis product Support Specialist:
A few months ago I shared an article reminding you to check if your Vault backups were occurring. For this article we are going to add a statement to your backup script to email the results to an individual and/or a group of people. This way even if you don’t have access to your Vault server, you can still get notified of its results.

BLAT Utility

I don’t promote 3^rd party applications, but this (freeware) utility is another way in which you can check to make sure your backups are occurring. It is called Blat (http://www.blat.net/) and it’s a command line utility that will send an email using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
However, please make sure to read all of the related documentation and abide by its licensing guidelines. Although I’m demonstrating how this tool can be useful, by no means does Synergis promote, recommend, or provide support for the “BLAT” tool or its required syntax. Use of this utility is at your own risk.
Once the utility is register on your Vault server, the next step is to add the command to your Vault backup script.   The following syntax needs to be placed somewhere after the (command) line that launches your Vault backup:
Blat –to <email recipient>,<email recipient> -cc <email recipient>,<email recipient> -subject “email subject line within quotes” –body “email message within quotes” –attacht <specify location of the vault backup log file>
For example:

Blat –to JohnDoe@jdoe.com,JaneDoe@jdoe.com -cc JdJrDoe@jdoe.com -subject “Vault Backup Results” –body “Please review the attachment to ensure the Vault backup has occurred.” –attacht D:\AutodeskDM\Backup\Backuplog.txt
You may also want to consider redirecting your backup log file to the “A” (or another) directory in order for the backup to generate a new log file every time and to email only the latest information.

Otherwise, the log file will continue to grow in size as your backups occur.
Until next time…
Mark L.
Mark Lancaster is a Product Support Specialist on our Helpdesk team working to support customers to create data-rich designs and efficient workflows.  Mark’s most previous experience is as the CAD Design Manager of Pall Corporation, one of our long time customers.  In that position, he was responsible for workstation optimization and design management, established uniform standards for the local and global offices, and developed global systems to control and manage their design data.
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