Forum Discussion

Dale_Mahalko_LH's avatar
7 years ago

Backup Exec 16 - Why won't it stop jobs immediately?

Why is it that active backup jobs will not just immediately cancel when requested?

Backup Exec 16 seems to be as responsive to a cancel request, as a freight train hauling 500 tons of steel rebar trying to stop.

After sitting here waiting for 10 minutes with four simultaneous deduplication backup jobs at "Cancel Pending", and the server CPU load at about 10%, I gave up and rebooted the Windows server.

On reboot, those jobs are now listed as "Recovered" and have kept on running anyway.

What the....?

,

Is there some way to just simply outright kill these jobs without waiting for "Cancel Pending"?

Do I have to physically disconnect the network cables or go into the Windows network properties and disable all the network adapters, to get it to finally listen to me and stop?

  • This is because BE is not a stand-alone application.  It has to invoke a lot of other process to do its job, e.g. VSS.  Hence stopping a job invokes stopping these processes first and this takes time.  Often these processes are unresponsive and BE still have to wait.

    If you want to stop a job immediately, then restart all the BE services.

  • As pkh states it takes a while to close down the various processes that BE services are interacting with. It can take from a few minutes to 30 - 35 minutes depending on what operation are being carried out by the server and underlying processes. The load on server is not a deciding factor in your case since CPU usage was low. If it is taking longer than that it could be a deadlock situation. In which case maybe a third party process isn’t responding to BE on time and hence causing delay. The simple way is to kill bengine ( repercussions are that some other jobs which would have been doing the backup will also end abruptly ) and restart all BE services from servicesmgr.exe. Killing the beremote process from the source being backed up also helps sometimes for a quicker cancellation.

    The jobs may get restarted after service restart or server reboot because it is possible that the checkpoint restart checkbox is selected in the backup job. If you want, you can go to job settings and uncheck this.

    The other aspect is that if you are constantly running into this behaviour is it because a certain backup is getting hung and that’s why you had to cancel this job ? Or was it just something else. If it’s the first issue then looking at why the backup got hung will help. A restart of BE services in this fashion mentioned above and uncheck checkpoint restart for now will help. If this is a constant issue then just mark how and when it happens (what’s the wait on job cancellation) and open a case with tech support.