Notifications

Get told when your backups succeed, fail, or need attention.

Notifications in SimpleBackups are built from notification channels. A channel is a destination — an email address, a Slack workspace, a webhook endpoint. You create channels once at Team level, then enable them on the individual backups and events you care about.

Supported channels

Channel	What you need to connect it
Email	One or more email addresses
Slack	OAuth — authorise SimpleBackups and pick a channel
Discord	OAuth — authorise SimpleBackups and pick a channel
Microsoft Teams	An incoming webhook URL (see below)
Telegram	A bot token and a chat ID (see below)
Pushover	Your application token and user key
Webhook	Any HTTPS endpoint that accepts POST — see Backup Webhook

Setting up a channel

Notification channels are managed from the resource you want to be notified about:

1. Open a backup, snapshot, or stack
2. Go to the Notifications tab
3. Under Team Notification Channels, click Add Notification Channel
4. Pick the channel type, fill in its details, and save

Channels you create are shared across the Team, so you only configure Slack or a webhook endpoint once and then reuse it on every backup.

Choosing which events to send

The Notifications section of the same tab is a grid of events against channels. Tick the combinations you want:

• On Success — the backup completed
• On Error — the backup failed
• New Resources Discovered — stack discovery found something new

!Success notifications are opt-in

By default, new backups notify you on failure only. Success notifications are off until you enable On Success — for the backup and channel you want them on.

This applies to manual and scheduled runs alike. Triggering a backup by hand does not produce a success notification unless On Success is enabled.

Failures and retries

Backups run by SSH or serverless workers are retried up to 3 times before the failure notification is sent, so a transient network blip does not page you. Backups run through the local agent get a single attempt, so their failure notification is sent immediately.

Microsoft Teams

!Office 365 Connectors were retired in May 2026

Microsoft disabled Office 365 Connectors in Teams in May 2026. The old setup path — Manage channel → Connectors → Incoming Webhook — no longer exists, and connector URLs created that way have stopped delivering.

If your Teams notifications went quiet, this is why. Create a Workflows webhook using the steps below and update the URL on your channel.

Teams incoming webhooks are now created with Workflows (Power Automate):

1. In Microsoft Teams, open the Workflows app
2. Choose the template Post to a channel when a webhook request is received
3. Select the team and channel that should receive notifications, then create the workflow
4. Copy the generated HTTP POST URL
5. In SimpleBackups, add a Microsoft Teams notification channel and paste the URL
6. Save the channel and enable it for the events you want

+Tip

Teams and Slack are worth having on the On Error event at minimum. Email alone is easy to miss, and a failed backup you do not know about is functionally the same as no backup.

Telegram

SimpleBackups sends Telegram notifications through a bot that you own. You create the bot, add it to the chat that should receive alerts, and give SimpleBackups the bot's token and the chat's ID.

Create a bot

1. In Telegram, open a chat with @BotFather
2. Send /newbot and follow the prompts to choose a display name and a username ending in bot
3. Copy the token BotFather sends back. It looks like 7123456789:AAHk3xQ9vLmN2pR8sT4uW6yZ1bC5dE7fG0h

The token gives full control of the bot, so treat it like a password. If it leaks, send /revoke to BotFather to issue a new one, then update the token on your SimpleBackups channel.

Add the bot to a chat

Where you add the bot depends on where you want notifications to land:

• Private chat — open a chat with your bot and click Start. Telegram bots cannot message you until you have messaged them first.
• Group — add the bot to the group as a member.
• Channel — add the bot as an administrator with permission to post messages.

Find the chat ID

Send any message in the chat (in a group, send /start@yourbot_username so the bot receives it). Then open this URL in your browser, replacing <token> with your bot token:

https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/getUpdates

Look for "chat":{"id":...} in the response. Private chat IDs are positive numbers such as 584712396, group IDs are negative such as -4812345678, and channel IDs start with -100, such as -1002198765432. For a public channel, you can also use its username, for example @acme_backups.

Connect it to SimpleBackups

1. Add a Telegram notification channel
2. Paste the token into Bot Token and the ID into Chat ID
3. Save the channel and enable it for the events you want

Which email address gets notifications?

Backup notifications go to the addresses configured on your Email notification channels — nowhere else.

Two other email fields exist in settings and are often confused with this one:

• Team contact email (Settings → Team profile) — used for activity reports and account communications, not for backup notifications
• Billing email — used for invoices only. See Invoices & Receipts

To forward backup alerts to a colleague, add their address to an Email notification channel (a single channel accepts several comma-separated addresses) rather than changing either of the fields above.

Backup WebhookPayload format, signature verification, and retry behaviour for webhook channels.›Backup Anomaly DetectionCatch backups that succeed but look wrong — a dump that suddenly shrinks, for example.›