Devices & 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)

Click a job on the dashboard, then a day square, to see the full backup history for that job on the Job Entries page.

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.