borgmatic/docs/how-to/customize-warnings-and-errors.md

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title: How to customize warnings and errors eleventyNavigation: key: 💥 Customize warnings/errors parent: How-to guides

order: 13

When things go wrong

After Borg runs, it indicates whether it succeeded via its exit code, a numeric ID indicating success, warning, or error. borgmatic consumes this exit code to decide how to respond. Normally, a Borg error results in a borgmatic error, while a Borg warning or success doesn't.

With Borg version 1.4+ If the default behavior isn't sufficient for your needs, you can customize how borgmatic interprets Borg's exit codes.

For instance, this borgmatic configuration elevates all Borg backup file permission warnings (exit code 105)—and only those warnings—to errors:

borg_exit_codes:
    - code: 105
      treat_as: error

The following configuration does that and elevates backup file not found warnings (exit code 107) to errors as well:

borg_exit_codes:
    - code: 105
      treat_as: error
    - code: 107
      treat_as: error

See the full list of Borg 1.4 error and warning exit codes. The rc: numeric value there tells you the exit code for each.

If you don't know the exit code for a particular Borg error or warning you're experiencing, you can usually find it in your borgmatic output when --verbosity 2 is enabled. For instance, here's a snippet of that output when a backup file is not found:

/noexist: stat: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/noexist'
...
terminating with warning status, rc 107

So if you want to configure borgmatic to treat this as an error instead of a warning, the exit status to use is 107.

With Borg version 1.2 and earlier Older versions of Borg didn't support granular exit codes, but still distinguished between Borg errors and warnings. For instance, to elevate Borg warnings to errors, thereby causing borgmatic to error on them, use the following borgmatic configuration with Borg 1.2 or below:

borg_exit_codes:
    - code: 1
      treat_as: error

Be aware though that Borg exits with a warning code for a variety of benign situations such as files changing while they're being read, so this example may not meet your needs.

Here's another Borg 1.2 example that squashes Borg errors to warnings:

borg_exit_codes:
    - code: 2
      treat_as: warning

Be careful with this example though, because it prevents borgmatic from erroring when Borg errors, which may not be desirable.