So I wrote up a short script that I am planning to run via a cron job daily to package up my site files and send them to a remote location. I also plan to incorporate DB dumps, but I have not gotten that far yet.

My issue today however is that Im am uncertain how to log the output of each command for errors, warnings, or other pertinent information the command may output. I would also like to install sometype of fail safe so if something goes horribly wrong the script will stop dead in its tracks and notify me via email or something. Ok the email thing is not as critical, but would be nice.

Does anybody have any ideas for that? Here is what I have so far.

By the way, both servers are CentOS 6.2 running standard LAMP.

#!/bin/sh

#################################
### Set Vars
#################################
THEDATE=`date +%m%d%y%H%M`

#################################
### Create Archives
#################################
tar -cf /root/backups/files/server_BAK_${THEDATE}.tar -C / var/www/vhosts
gzip /root/backups/files/server_BAK_${THEDATE}.tar

#################################
### Send Data to Remote Server
#################################
scp /root/backups/files/server_BAK_${THEDATE}.tar.gz user@host:/home/bak1/ftp/backups/

#################################
### Remove Data from this Server
#################################
rm -rf /root/backups/files/server_BAK_${THEDATE}.tar.gz