yeah, I scripted my backup jobs, and use good old email notifications to report.

I expect an email every day. If I don't receive one, I know there's a problem with email delivery.

You could use one of those services that expect a regular http heartbeat. I'm personally using uptimerobot for that. Within a .bat or .sh file, add a

  restic [...] && curl <heartbeat-url>

and you'll get eventually notified if backup jobs fails too often.

I've tinkered with that using healthchecks, but I don't really trust that I know what I'm doing when setting it up.

Restic is also confusing to me with forgetting snapshots and doing cleanup, I don't understand why that isn't run as part of the backup (or is it? The docs aren't clear).

no, you have to run "restic forget" with the policy you want (keep last X, last monthly Y, etc.) followed up with a "restic prune". Or you can pass "--prune" to the "forget" command I think.

You don't always want to forget/prune snapshots. Especially if you're using a cloud service like B2. It can easily cost you more to prune than actual storage costs if you're not careful.

See here: https://www.seanh.cc/2022/04/03/restic/#maintaining-your-bac...

and

https://kdecherf.com/blog/2018/12/28/restic-and-backblaze-b2...

Thanks for the links! That's helpful, the part about B2 makes sense.

Yeah I had to invent my own.

On Linux I used cron + email. You can setup postfix such that you use your personal gmail or whatever, then you will be able to do "echo message" | mail -s youremail.com to send an email. They (big email providers) always allow you to send an email as yourself to yourself.

On Windows, I used the native task scheduler (with various triggers like time, lock workstation, idle and so on) and send an email using powershell, which can also send emails using SMTP.

Same here. I have a wrapper script that runs restic commands. Whether I run it in a console or per crontab stdout/stderr is logged to a file and is emailed to me (in the crontab case). Nothing fancy yet, but it works and I am satisfied. Still pretty new to restic though. In another life I had a disaster recovery role and was using DLT for backup / restore of all the things, so ...