Impressions of BackupExec 2012

To be honest, I too have the same feelings.  I have been using BE since it was owned by Veritas and having spent the past week inside this program getting it running.  It really feels like I am clicking more times than I have ever clicked in my life.  The transition from 2010 R3 to 2012 has been nothing short of nightmarish.

Absolutely more clicking than before as everything about a particular object is "conveniently" inside of it in a folder tree configuration.  Changing some views to List instead of Tree can help a little bit, but not totally eliminate the issue.

I can see getting used to the change, but not loving it.

Backup products are designed by developers with little input from real-world users :*-(

Current 2010 environment is backing up about 100 servers compressed down into about 12 jobs a day.  I can't do that with 2012's server centric view.  Spun up a vm to test it out I have since deleted it. I can't see how in it's current form it can be anywhere as easy to manage all my backups as it is now in 2010.  I want some of the new features but until I can as easily manage all my servers like being able to bundle them up into single jobs through a GUI and not rely on CLI (don't see how that is a solution considering how easy it is to re-order servers in a job through the gui now or add a new server to an existing multiserver job), I will be staying put.

Have been using Backupexec for I don't know how long just checked I still have a version 9 install in production at a remote site.  Can't understand why such a drastic change in the way the product now handles backups.  If you didn't have to many servers to backup I can see it not being too bad but the more you are trying to backup the worse it looks.

Yippiee!!  it looks...... really nice but you can´t use it :O

Glad to see some one else here hate this new look!!!

The new BE 2012 totally destroyed my jobs and now i have been working 4 days to get everything back to normal but no luck installing BE 2010 again, now i have to clean the registry and see if it works.

Advice to others who is thinking of an update to BE2012, DON´T do it!

Here is one lost customer!!

We did talk to hundreds of customers in the process of building BE 2012 and did everything we could to incorporate all the feedback.  We knew there would be some folks who would miss the old way, but we hope in time those folks will see the streamlined nature of the new product, especially as we continue to nurture it and learn from your continued feedback.

So, I hope I can help all of you with one thing you may have missed about the new UI:

Server grouping (allows you to modify many jobs at once): http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO74389   

The feedback I have heard says this is one overlooked feature that really seems to make a big difference in how you use BE 2012 in a more complex environment.

Check out this blog to get a better feel of the how and why of the BE 2012 UI: https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/new-backup-exec-2012-user-experience

Finally, I have heard manu users report they have a much better understanding of how things work after watching a few videos about BE 2012: http://www.backupexec.com/videos

So, while sometimes it may not seem like we listen, I can tell you it is my job to listen to ALL the BE customers and we do our best to make the right decisions.  When we don't, we do our best to make it right.

Thanks for the feedback, it's exciting to see the passion around BE!

Keep the feedback coming!

I feel the same... One deployment has 5 servers, all VM. Backups are a nice, clean 5-job set.

Another customer has 17 servers, all but 5 virtual. Combinations of Exchange, SQL, AD, etc. I have 24 backup jobs to handle the 12 virtual servers (VM Agent for Disaster Recovery, 12 more for daily data backup via the RAWS agent because GRT isn't processing the VMs properly, and then another 5 full/inc jobs for the physical servers.  I used to rely on email logs to get all of the info I needed, but now I'm going to have to design a report, or log into the servers to see if I have the pretty green "tabs" on the logs.

I think understand how the server groupings work but it still doesn't help if you have 30 servers in a group and you can set a backup job for them or modify them all at once guess what they all try to start at the same time whats the point of that?? and guess what selection lists allowed me to modify the backups of multiple server all at once as well but only required 1 job and 1 start time to manage. How is it more streamlined when you need to manage 100 servers and now 100 jobs instead of say 10 or 12 jobs??  Server groupings does not mean less jobs it's just a view to show you servers that match a specific criteria and I'm pretty sure you can have servers in multiple groups?? (can't confirm vm deleted).  The menu stuff i'm not concerned about but my backups and backup management is. 

If you had a small environment great if you have a large environment guess what it's not easier and more streamlined.  Like someone else has raised the product is so server centric even when you link jobs using cli script or whatever (insert afterthought) you have to do, it still doesn't count them as a single job as it unloads and reloads the tape head between the servers everytime.  When this product was developed were they doing testing with only 5 servers or something 1 vm 1 exchnage 1 fileserver and 1 sql??

Don't get me wrong some of the new features are great but I can't justify the benafits when the managment overhead would become so great and complicated.

When you guys talked to the 100's of customers did they all say "Please change the way BE works as much as you can because it sux and has sucked for years and doesn't work and we can't use it"??

What was the driving force behind such a monumental change in the way the product does backups.

Massive rant I know but super frustrated at a product that is so engrained and a major part of our disaster recover in our business and has been (we have made massive investments in backup hardware to support what we have with some of these being done in the last few months) for quite some time with us wanting to expand and start doing SSO and Central Admin to find out that in it's current form the product is almost unusable.  Bottom line we cannot replicate our backups as they are as they have been with the BE2010 product.

To address the first point about 100 servers and not 100 jobs, instead of 10-12 jobs...  I will say with the direction of backing up to disk that BackupExec has taken, since it's so terrible with tape.  That this is a good thing.  More concurrent backups can be sent at a time.

I've always advocated more jobs with less servers in it to speed up backups as well as lock down specific GRT or VSS related settings.  

It's a good thing that Symantec went this way with BackupExec.  It makes it ore logical for an advanced shop that had disk in their backup routine.  For folks still on tape, it sucks since there is no multi-plexing available.  

I've got Netbackup environments that do thousands of jobs in a day.  I've also got other competing products that I wrok with from commvault and EMC that do thousands of jobs per day.  And those products have always been better at grouping servers...

The Achilles  heal to Symantec NetBackup and BackupExec is the lack of innovation.  The products have evolved over the years, and features bolted on.  Though not integrated into the product.  Yes NOT integrated.      You can see this as with each version you see new options in the job menu or in the NBU server properties.  That list got really long over the years.  My god, why can't they merge the two products already!