InMotion Hosting: Send email alert when backup limit exceeded

If you’re on a VPS or dedicated server and paying for our automatic backup service, you might like to know when you’ve gone over the current backup disk-space limit you’re paying for.

Email alert script

Below we’ll create a disk-space monitoring script that can email us when our backup limit is exceeded.

1. Login to your server with SSH
2. Run the following commands to create our script:

   touch /etc/cron.daily/backupDiskCheck.cron
   chmod 755 /etc/cron.daily/backupDiskCheck.cron
   

3. Now using a text editor like nano create the following script:

   nano /etc/cron.daily/backupDiskCheck.cron

   Change the [email protected] address and the 10 threshold below:

   #!/bin/bash
   ADMIN="[email protected]"
   THRESHOLD=10
   
   df -h | awk '/\/$/ {print $3,$NF}' | while read output;
   
   do
     usedDisk=$(echo $output | awk '{print $1}' | sed 's#G##')
     partition=$(echo $output | awk '{print $2}')
   
     if [ $usedDisk -ge $THRESHOLD ] && [ $partition = "/" ]
       then
       echo "$(date +%d/\%h/%Y" "%T): Your server $(hostname) is OVER the \
       $(echo $THRESHOLD)G automatic backup limit, you're using $(echo $usedDisk)G on \
       the $partition partition." | mail -s"Alert: Over Automatic Backup limit" $ADMIN
     fi
   done

4. If you were following along and using nano to edit this file, you can now hit Ctrl-O to bring up the write file dialog, and then hit Enter to save your changes.

Now once a day your server should check to see if the disk-space usage is over the current level of automatic backups you’re paying for.

If it does exceed this limit, then you should receive an email at the address you entered with a message like:

03/Sep/2013 16:28:04: Your server vps0123.inmotionhosting.com is currently OVER the 10G automatic backup limit, and is using 28G on the / partition.