Backup4all provides a log engine that helps you track the backup, restore, test, clean and calculate statistics operations. It is composed of four subsystems: backup logging, restore logging, test logging and cleanup logging. Log files are accessible from the Jobs tab, History section.
For each operation the system logs:
- start time and date
- the operation
- errors or warnings
- end time and date
The File->Options->Logs and history configuration window provides additional options that you can select to further customize the logging process.
Log Overview
Backup4all generates log files in various instances. Some logs deal with the running components (applications) of Backup4all, while others are generated every time a backup related action is performed. These logs are generated during backup, testing, restoring, cleanup and statistics calculation.
The format of an action related log file is as follows:
<job-name>_YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.<action>.log
<job-name> - refers to the specific job on which the action was executed
YYYYMMDDHHMMSS - is the year, month, day, hour, minute and second in which this log was generated
<action> - refers to the action (backup, restore etc.)
The easiest way to examine specific logs is to right click on a job in the Main Window, go to Job Logs and select the latest log of a certain type from the list. Alternatively, from the Jobs tab, you may click on Open Log Folder. This will open the log folder in Explorer. The log folder contains all the logs that Backup4all has created. The tags in the file names are helpful for sorting the logs and finding specific ones.
Content
Log detailed information
If this option is enabled, the logs will contain information about every file used in the backup, restore or test process.
Include summary in log
If this option is checked, the logs will include all the text available in the Summary view.
Log folder
After a long period the application will generate a large number of log files. Since all the log files are stored in the same folder, the system has an option to limit the size of the log folder. Just select Restricted to and choose a Size and Unit for the log folder (default is 200MB). If the log file of the running backup job is larger than the limit, it will still be stored in the log folder. When the same operation will run again, the previous log file will be deleted.
If you want to keep all log files no matter the size, select the Unlimited size option.