Devices & Groups

Devices and jobs are discovered automatically from incoming emails. You can rename them, assign schedules, and organize devices into groups.

Devices

A device represents a server, NAS, or appliance that runs backups. BackupMonitor creates a device the first time it sees an email mentioning that machine.

From the Devices page (or by clicking a device name on the dashboard) you can:

  • Set a friendly alias name (the parsed name from the email is kept as reference)
  • Assign the device to a group
  • Activate or deactivate the device - deactivated devices are hidden from the dashboard
  • View all jobs on the device and drill into their history

Jobs

A job is a single backup task (e.g. "Nightly Full Backup" or "Exchange Backup"). Jobs appear automatically when their status emails arrive.

When editing a job you can configure:

  • Name - display alias for the job
  • Active - inactive jobs are excluded from the dashboard and missing-mail checks
  • Schedule - when the job is expected to run:
    • Daily - select which weekdays (Mon–Sun)
    • Monthly - by day number (e.g. the 1st) or by weekday (e.g. "second Tuesday")
    • Not planned - no missing-mail detection; status is shown only when emails arrive
  • Grace period - number of days a job may report errors before the day is marked as failed (overrides the account default from Settings)

Missing backups

If a job is active and scheduled for a given day but no status email arrives, BackupMonitor marks that day as missing - the same as a failure. This is one of BackupMonitor's core features: silent backup failures get caught even when the backup software never sends an error report.

Make sure job schedules match your real backup cadence. A job set to "daily on weekdays" that actually runs only on Sundays will show false missing errors on other days.

Groups

Groups let you organize devices - typically by customer, location, or department. The dashboard and Call to Action both use groups as section headers.

From the Groups page you can:

  • Create and rename groups
  • Activate or deactivate a group - this bulk-activates or deactivates all jobs on devices in the group
  • Delete a group (only when it contains no devices)

New devices land in a default group until you assign them elsewhere. An empty dashboard with no groups shows a welcome screen with your inbound address.