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Hello Bastiaan,

A failed backup means that the backup script crashed. The PHP script is dead. Dead can't talk (or send emails). Put another way: Asking Akeeba Backup to email you when it fails is like asking a soldier to radio back if he dies during his mission. Obviously the dead soldier can't radio back the fact that he's dead trying to accomplish its mission. Likewise, Akeeba Backup can't email you the fact that it died trying to backup your site. Your soldier is dead and can no longer communicate. That's the only reason I have not implemented this feature.

As far as I understand the extremely sketchy PHP documentation on error handlers, when a fatal error occurs you have a very limited amount of time (I suppose a few dozens msec) to do clean up, like closing connections and stuff. I'm actually using this to log timeout failures. That said, it seems to not be called in the case of a Fatal error and it seems to be unable to load new files and/or create new resources which is what would be required to send an email.

Regarding your question, when a CLI script fails (note: applies only to CLI scripts running under the PHP CLI binary!) PHP returns exit status 1. Remote CLI also outputs a non-zero exit code when something fails. Here's a catch, though. If you are using the PHP CGI –instead of the PHP CLI– binary I think that the exit code is not set and there's no way to catch the error condition automatically. Also, I don't see anything in CRON's documentation which suggests that it can send emails when a CRON job fails. It can log failures to syslog, but that's about it. So I'm not sure how that feature you mention in RackSpace would work?

Ah, now I understand what you're talking about. These are warnings, not errors. There is a reason why these can't be sent out with the email. In order to prevent a memory outage we trash the warnings cache as soon as we proceed to the next backup step. By the time the email is sent, there is no record of those warnings any more.

You're welcome, Bastiaan!