Forum Discussion

Jon_Sumida's avatar
Jon_Sumida
Level 5
15 years ago

Babysitting BESR 2010 clients and issues


I really like the BESR 2010 product...except for one thing. It seems I have to "babysit" more clients then I would like to. By this I mean, I log on almost daily to my Management Console to make sure everything is going ok. But everytime there is a handful of clients that for whatever reasons have skipped/missed backups for several days or are stuck doing a backup. Normally I have to reboot the PCs or clear out the *.PQJ and *.PQH files and start a new base recovery point. I've been all over these forums and on search engines looking for reasons why these things are happening and there's no real concrete answers. I manage 300 PCs and doing this extra work to maintain the backups is stretching my time really thin. Is there an update with fixes coming soon? These are my main issues:

- skipped/missed backups, clients look fine (green check box in system tray icon). I can tell they missed because in the Manage Tasks, Computers view in the Console it shows last time run as several days ago

- misreporting of the "Last Run" date when you open the client. The one on my PC says my last backup ran was 42 days ago, but in my backup history it shows backups successfully completed every day

- backups hanging at 95% or even at other points. No future backups will run because they think it's stll not completed. Must reboot PCs and/or delete PQJ/PGH files


Again this happens on a handful of PCs usually and they seem to randomly happen. Different PCs, different dates, etc.  I've posted about some of these issues before and gotten nothing really except a link to this: " http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/352307.htm  "  That page might explain some of my issues, but there doesn't seem to be any progress on that. Anyone else experiencing any/all of these issues? I'm using version 9.0.1.36527
Backup and Recovery
BESR 2010
System Recovery
Troubleshooting
  • Markus_Koestler's avatar
    Markus_Koestler
    Moderator
    15 years ago
    Yep, your first and second issuse also occur with me. I've opened a case for the 2nd problem and Symantec confirmed it. I hope that the upcomming BESR 2010 SP2 later this year will solve a couple of issues currently discussed here in the forum. Regarding the first issue I think I've read a post here in the form that this will be definitly fixed with SP2. Regarding your 3rd issue, we had a similar issue but our backups hung at 4%.
  • Jon_Sumida's avatar
    Jon_Sumida
    Level 5
    15 years ago

    well it's good to know I'm not alone on this island :)  Nice to hear you opened a case with Symantec. They don't seem to frequent this particular forum very much in contrast to the Symantec Endpoint Protection one. I guess more money comes from that product, lol. 

    I am crossing my fingers a SP2 will fix a lot of these. So when your backups hung, what did you do? Same thing I did?
  • criley's avatar
    criley
    Moderator
    15 years ago

    - skipped/missed backups, clients look fine (green check box in system tray icon). I can tell they missed because in the Manage Tasks, Computers view in the Console it shows last time run as several days ago

    Are you checking the backup destination folder to see if backups are actually running or being skipped?

    - misreporting of the "Last Run" date when you open the client. The one on my PC says my last backup ran was 42 days ago, but in my backup history it shows backups successfully completed every day

    As Markus says, this is a known issue which has already been reported to our engineering team. I can't add any further detail at this point.
  • Jon_Sumida's avatar
    Jon_Sumida
    Level 5
    15 years ago
     Hi Chris, thanks for replying.

    Yes, I do check the backup destination and it varies. Normally if I open the client and the Status says I've missed a backup, it's not correct. To get an accurate account of when my backups ran, I go into the Backup History and see. Those show the actual successful backup dates and they more often then not correspond to what is in the backup destination.  So like for my PC, it still says 43 days since my last backup in the status, but it's been backing up everyday according to the Backup History and the files in the backup destination. BUT, I do have some PCs that have just skipped their backups altogether for a few days (at random it seems).  

    I have noticed that what gets reported in regards to last backup dates/times varies depending on what you are looking at. You can see a last backup date in the Status on the client, the Backup History, as well as on the Management Console under Computers view in Tasks and when you look at the actual backup policy. I've seen different results listed in all of these locations, it's hard to determine which one is acutally right. I've found that the Backup History locally on each client is the most accurate.
  • Markus_Koestler's avatar
    Markus_Koestler
    Moderator
    15 years ago

    I've wrote a perl script that check the XML file behind the Backup History tab on the local BESR client, maybe you are interested in it ?
  • Jon_Sumida's avatar
    Jon_Sumida
    Level 5
    15 years ago

    Yes, I'd like to check that out if you don't mind. How do you use it in your environment?
  • Markus_Koestler's avatar
    Markus_Koestler
    Moderator
    15 years ago

    It runs as a scheduled task with a user account which has read permissions on the servers .
    The file checklastbackup.txt contains the computernames of the servers (and in our case also workstations) to be checked, one per line.
    What you might have to change is the first if/else structe because there I sort out whether the computer to be checked is a server (contains S in the computer name) or a workstation.

    Here is the code:
    <code>
                 ($seconds, $minutes, $hours, $day_of_month, $month, $year,
                         $wday, $yday, $isdst) = localtime(time);
                --$day_of_month;
                ++$month;
                $year+=1900;
                $cmpdate=$month."/".$day_of_month."/".$year;



    open (DATA,"checklastbackup.txt");

    while (<DATA>) {
        chomp;
        if ($_ =~ /S/) {
                $B="\\\\$_\\c\$\\winnt\\profiles\\all users\\application data\\Symantec\\Backup Exec System Recovery\\Schedule";
        }else {
                $B="\\\\$_\\c\$\\winnt\\profiles\\all users\\Anwendungsdaten\\Symantec\\Backup Exec System Recovery\\Schedule";
        }

            opendir THISDIR, "$B" or print "serious dainbramage: $! $B\n";
            @allfiles1 = readdir THISDIR;
            closedir THISDIR;

            foreach $file1 (@allfiles1) {


                    next if (($file1 eq ".") || ($file1 eq "..") || (uc($file1) !~ /PQJ/ ) );

            open (FILE,"$B\\$file1") or print $!;
            @File=<FILE>;
            close (FILE);
            foreach $line (@File) {
            @personal = split(/LastBackup/, $line);
                $string=$personal[1];
                $string =~ s/\vt="7">//;
                $string =~ s/\<\///;
                $string =~ s/\x20//gm;


        }

    }
    </code>
  • Jon_Sumida's avatar
    Jon_Sumida
    Level 5
    15 years ago

    Cool. Thanks Markus. What does the output file show you? Just the actual backup date/times that are reported to the backup history of each client?



  • mdwhome's avatar
    mdwhome
    Level 3
    15 years ago
    Is there an actual release date for SP2? We are experiencing the same problem with the job "hanging" at 95% until the service is restarted, then it runs fine until the next hang episode.