Script on fail?

[Diggory]

Hello,

Just a bit of background: I'm not a user of SuperDuper personally, but I hear very good things about it.

I'm currently doing some freelance work for a client who runs a company which provides IT support for home users of Macs and PCs. Imagine a company's IT department, except that instead of looking after the machines of the employees of a company it looks after individuals' home machines.

The company provides several services for these home users, one of which is making sure that they have back-ups whether they realise it or not. For Mac users they install a NAS (or other external drive) for storage and install SuperDuper! to do the backing-up of the main drives.

At the moment my job for this company is to develop a web-based application for the head-office which will allow the company to monitor the status of each of their clients' back-up systems. i.e. at a glance the company can see if any of their clients automated back-up systems has failed or, for what ever reason, stopped the automated back-up routine.

I've decided to achieve this by getting the clients' back-up systems to email the server whenever backups occur (or fail to occur.)

On Windows systems this seems to work well - the client machines can send emails that report success or failure.

However.... With SuperDuper! there doesn't appear to be an option to script the failure scenario. I see that there are options to run scripts before back-up and on success - but upon failure there doesn't appear to be any way of getting information out.

I've searched this forum - and the general solution appears to be 'use the Mail Me plug-in from Growl.' Alas this isn't really an option for me. I love Growl - in fact I've been one of the developers on it (in a small way.) But this is not an option in this case. I cannot suggest to my client that he installs Growl on all his Mac-using clients' machines. For a start Growl assumes that you want Growl notifications shown by default, so any application that the client installs may start showing Growl notifications without warning (not good.)

I noticed that SuperDuper! is able to perform actions on failure (since the app Growls on failure) - so I had a look at the AppleScript code inside the SuperDuper! app bundle which is in charge of the scheduled backup system and thought about modifying that to send emails directly. Alas, this is not a suitable solution either - since I would have to provide a modified version of SuperDuper! to my client to distribute to his clients and every time the app was updated I would have to modify the app bundle again - and this modified app would have to be propagated to all the companies clients every update.

So - In rather a long winded way - I am asking - is there any hope that in a future version we might see an option in SuperDuper! where it can run a script on failure?

Or failing that has anyone got any clever ideas to solve my problem (getting SuperDuper! to send an email on failure without Growl.)

Thanks,

Diggory.