Notifications and email alerts

DeltaSnap records everything it does and tells you about the things that need a decision. By default it does that without interrupting you. This page covers where notifications appear, what makes one critical, how to let DeltaSnap interrupt you when you want that, and how to have notifications and activity delivered by email.

Two records: notifications and activity

DeltaSnap keeps two separate records, and it helps to know which one you are looking at.

• Notifications are the short list of things worth your attention: a snapshot that failed, a mass-change alarm, a volume running out of space, snapshots that were pruned or discovered. Each has read and unread state and lives in the Notifications window.
• Activity is the complete audit trail: every snapshot created, deleted, indexed, compared, mounted, or restored, and every protection or tag change, with the volume, who asked for it, and how long it took. It lives in the Activity window and is far too detailed to be an inbox.

Both records are stored locally on your Mac. See Volumes and interface for where the two windows are.

Where notifications appear

• Notifications window. A persistent inbox. Each entry shows its title, message, time, volume, and, where it applies, an Open action that takes you to the affected volume or file. You can mark entries read or unread, delete them, or clear everything. A recurring condition such as low free space refreshes its existing entry rather than stacking a new one every time, and when a condition clears (the background service recovers, free space comes back) the entry turns into the recovery notice instead of disappearing, so the window always tells the same story as your mailbox.
• Toolbar bell. Shows the unread count and turns red while an unread critical notification exists.
• Menu bar. The DeltaSnap icon carries a red dot while an unread critical notification exists, and the menu-bar panel lists the most recent unread entries.

The inbox keeps the most recent 500 notifications. Nothing in it is uploaded anywhere.

Critical and general notifications

Every notification is either critical or general. The distinction decides whether DeltaSnap may interrupt you and, if you use email, whether a message is sent right away.

Quiet by default

Settings → Notifications → Let notifications interrupt me is off when you install DeltaSnap. With it off, every notification is still recorded, the bell and the menu-bar dot still carry the signal, and the Notifications window lists the full history. Nothing pops up, nothing takes focus, and that includes helper problems and failed snapshots.

Switch it on and two things change:

• Important notices show a macOS system banner. DeltaSnap asks for notification permission at that moment, not before.
• A critical notification brings DeltaSnap to the front and opens the Notifications window on top of whatever you were doing, so a mass-change alarm cannot be missed.

We keep it off by default because a background utility that steals focus over a low-space warning is worse than one that waits to be looked at. If you would rather hear about problems immediately and on a different device, the email route below is usually the better answer.

Email notifications

Email notifications are for Macs you are not sitting at: a build or render machine, a family member's Mac you look after, a workstation that runs unattended, or a fleet managed under a Business license. DeltaSnap's background service does the sending, through your own mail account or mail server, so it works whether the app is open, closed, or nobody is logged in. Nothing is sent through ScaleNinja and there is no ScaleNinja account involved.

Set it up

1. Open Settings → Notifications.
2. Under Mail Server, enter the server, port, security mode, user name, and password. Leave From empty to send from the user name when it is an email address. Settings are handed to the background service as you type; a password that is already stored shows as "Stored", and you only need to type one to replace it.
3. Under Email, enter one or more recipients in To, separated by commas.
4. Click Send Test Email. It works whether or not email notifications are switched on, and it reports exactly what the server said if something is wrong.
5. Turn on Send email notifications and choose what to send.

The same settings are available from Terminal for scripted or fleet setups: dsnap email status, dsnap email set host=smtp.example.com port=587 security=starttls user=me@example.com password=- to=ops@example.com scope=critical enabled=on (with password=- reading the password from standard input, so it never lands in the shell history), and dsnap email test. See the CLI reference.

Common provider settings:

The settings and the password are kept by the background service in a file only an administrator can read, alongside DeltaSnap's other machine-wide settings. They are not per-user: every account on the Mac shares one configuration.

What to send

Send offers three levels:

• Critical notifications only. Failed snapshots and restores, mass-change alarms, a degraded helper, and volumes DeltaSnap can no longer keep space on. The right choice for most people.
• All notifications. Everything the Notifications window shows, including low-space warnings, storage advice, pruning results, and snapshots that were discovered or left mounted.
• All notifications and activities. All of the above plus every entry from the activity log. Useful when you want a mailbox record of what DeltaSnap did on a machine, and noisy by design on a busy schedule.

How emails are grouped

DeltaSnap does not send one email per event.

• Critical notifications go out within a few seconds. A critical item waits about two seconds so that a burst, such as an alarm and the safety snapshot it took, arrives as one message. Anything already waiting in the digest rides along.
• Everything else is grouped into one email per minute. The first general notification or activity starts a 60-second window, and everything that arrives during it goes into the same message. A scheduled snapshot that produces "created" and "indexed" entries on three volumes becomes one email, not six. On a busy schedule with activities enabled, expect roughly one email per snapshot cycle.
• One message to every recipient. Each email is one connection to your mail server, addressed to all recipients at once.
• Long digests are capped. An email lists at most 100 items and states how many more were omitted; the full record is always in the Notifications and Activity windows. At most 500 items wait in the queue.

A single-item email is titled after the item, for example [DeltaSnap] Critical: Snapshot failed. A digest is titled with the counts and the Mac's name, for example [DeltaSnap] 2 notifications and 6 activities on studio-mac. The body lists each item with its time, volume, and detail, and ends with a note on where to change the setting.

Two things are deliberately not re-sent. A recurring condition that DeltaSnap refreshes in place, such as low space on the same volume, is emailed when it first appears and not on every refresh. And switching on activities never mails the activity history that already exists; only entries recorded from that moment on are sent.

When email cannot be sent

If the mail server cannot be reached or rejects a message, DeltaSnap keeps the items and retries with increasing delays, from one minute up to thirty, over roughly the next hour and a half. After the third failure in a row it posts a general notification, Email notifications are not being delivered, with the server's reply. That notification is never itself emailed. Settings → Notifications shows the last delivery problem and the time of the last successful send, and the notice turns into "being delivered again" on the next successful delivery. Changing any mail setting resets the retry delay, so a fix is tried right away.

When an alarm that was emailed clears, for example the background service recovering, the recovery is emailed as well, whatever the scope, so the mailbox never ends on an open alarm.

Sent by the background service

The background service sends the email, not the app. It starts with the Mac and runs whether or not anyone is logged in, so a failed scheduled snapshot at 3 a.m. or a low-space warning on a locked workstation reaches you all the same. Items that could not be sent yet are kept on disk, so a restart of the service, or of the Mac, does not lose them.

The same service also keeps a notification log. When you open DeltaSnap after it was closed for a while, the Notifications window fills in with everything that happened in between, unread but without banners.

The one exception is notifications the app raises itself about things you just did in it, such as a restore that failed or a snapshot left mounted. Those exist only while the app is running, and the app hands them to the service for delivery the moment it raises them.

Privacy and security

• Email goes only to the server you configure, using the credentials you entered. DeltaSnap never sends notification content to ScaleNinja.
• The password is stored root-owned on the Mac, readable only by an administrator, and never returned to the app or the CLI: both can set or clear it and are only told whether one is stored.
• Notification text can include volume names, snapshot names, and, for activities, file paths that were restored or compared. Choose recipients accordingly.
• SSL/TLS and STARTTLS connections verify the server's certificate and host name against the system trust store. A self-signed certificate is refused rather than trusted silently. The None option sends in plain text and shows a warning when a password is set; use it only with a relay on a network you control.
• The full picture of what DeltaSnap sends over the network is in the Privacy Policy.