Is there a program out there that can send me an email in the event of a hard drive failure? I have a Windows Home Server in the house, and each night some of the shares and the computer backups get copied to an external drive on an old computer in the detached garage, via Robocopy. The computer in the garage is my “offsite” backup. There is no risk of flood, tornado, or wildfire where I live so I figure that is good enough.
Eventually that drive will fail, but I wouldn’t know it unless I happened to check on it. Is there an application I can run on the computer in the garage that will notify me if the drive become unreadable? Or is there a way to have robocopy email a notification if it can’t make the backup?
The point of keeping the backup in the garage is if the house burns down I only lose the WHS. If the garage burns down I only lose the backup. I might lose both if jet a falls on the property.
I’m not sure if an SMTP server is necessary. I already have an add-in that emails WHS notifications. An email client can send emails without having a server on the machine, shouldn’t a monitoring program be able to do the same?
Most HDD monitors keep tabs on the disks using SMART. Unfortunately this doesn’t work for the run of the mill USB drive, which is where the backups are (I’m using a USB drive so I can plug it into the WHS for a restore rather than restoring back over the network).
It looks like I need a program that will do some kind of read/write test. I found one, but I don’t think email notification is a feature. Is there a way I might do this with a combination of programs? Is there any kind of automation or scripting program? Something that can simply try to access a network share, and then alert me if it fails?