I promise to stop spamming the list now! Final draft. I know the email component should be put into a function but I'm a bad man and didn't do it! Just added an extra section that checks to make sure that tar didn't throw an error code for some reason when it exited. Chris BACKUPDIR="/home/username/backup" WHATTOBACKUP="/var/www" SERVERNAME="servername" BACKUPADMIN="<a href="mailto:email@domain.com">email@domain.com</a>" MESSAGE="/tmp/message.txt" if [ -d $BACKUPDIR -a -d $WHATTOBACKUP ] #make sure the source & dest dirs exist then #backup the directory /bin/tar -cpzf $BACKUPDIR/`date +%a"-"%d"-"%b"-"%Y"-"`backup.tar.gz $WHATTOBACKUP RESULT=$? #grab the tar exit code if [ $RESULT -eq 0 ] #tar will return non-zero if an error occurs. If we have a 0 exit code continue then #then remove anything over 7 days old find $BACKUPDIR/*.tar.gz -mtime +7 -exec rm -f {} \; #And let us know what happened SUBJECT="Backup Completed" TO=$BACKUPADMIN echo "Backup of $SERVERNAME completed" >> $MESSAGE echo "Result of backup" >> $MESSAGE echo "`ls -alt` $BACKUPDIR" >> $MESSAGE /usr/bin/mail -s "$SUBJECT" "$TO" < $MESSAGE rm $MESSAGE exit else #send a mail if tar failed SUBJECT="Backup Failure" TO=$BACKUPADMIN echo "Backup of $SERVERNAME failed" >> $MESSAGE echo "Unable to create tar archive. Tar exit code was $RESULT" >> $MESSAGE /usr/bin/mail -s "$SUBJECT" "$TO" < $MESSAGE rm $MESSAGE exit fi else #if backup dir does not exist, tell us SUBJECT="Backup Failure" TO=$BACKUPADMIN echo "Error backing up $SERVERNAME" >> $MESSAGE echo "One of the following directories is missing: $BACKUPDIR $WHATTOBACKUP " >> $MESSAGE echo "Date: `date`" >> $MESSAGE /usr/bin/mail -s "$SUBJECT" "$TO" < $MESSAGE rm $MESSAGE fi