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# There Is No Haystack
- URL: https://blog.techstreamlined.com/there-is-no-haystack/
- Published: 2026-08-26T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-26T16:52:38.000Z
- Author: Ari Footlik

*I was reminded by a recent incident that it’s often just as important to be intentionally made aware that things* **are** *working, as it is to know when they’re* **not** *. And it's a lot easier to spot the needle if you reduce the haystack to a few blades of grass.*

Every morning for the past few years, I've been reviewing and deleting 18 separate emails reporting the status of 18 separate backup jobs.

Below is my response after I was asked to investigate a failed operation someone noticed this morning.

> Good morning!  
>  
> Actually, at 12:01am this morning we received a notification via email that the server named "Justin" was unable to create a backup of server "Justin" (itself).  
> The 9:01am CDT email you saw is a status-summary from one of our two backup servers; the summary from the other server, "Case," showed all its' jobs completed successfully.  
> The alert from Justin indicated a file-access conflict - one process trying to read a file while another process is trying to write to it.  
> Every few days an access-conflict like this prevents the backup servers from backing themselves up.  
>  
> The backup servers don’t really change much, and in that context this error/failure is benign unless it happens multiple days in a row.  
> We could try rescheduling the backups to mitigate the conflict, but I don’t think it’s worth rocking that boat for this error related to this particular server.  
>  
> There are nine servers being backed up, including the two backup servers.  
> Until yesterday, successful or not, each server triggered 2 status-alert emails per day: local backup status, and off-site copy status.  
>  
> Yesterday I reconfigured daily notifications so we're sent summaries from each server, and individual alerts only from failed operations.

This morning someone noticed an error that’s been happening, on and off, for a good, long while; and about which they've been receiving status alerts amidst those 18 daily emails.

And ***that’s*** why I switched to digest emails.