Forum Discussion

e-charge's avatar
e-charge
Level 3
13 years ago

BESR & SSR Scheduled Jobs Intermittently Not Running.

As quoted in a "Known Issues" article by Chris Riley from Symantec's tech team:

"Problem

Using Symantec System Recovery (SSR), recovery point set backups are intermittently not running according to the defined schedule.

No errors are seen in the SSR user interface (UI) or in the Windows event logs."

 

My Experience:

We're seeing this exact issue on an SBS 2011 Standard SP1 machine with SSR 2011.
We're also seeing it on an SBS 2003 SP2 machine with BESR 8.5.

We were also seeing the issue on a Server 2003 R2 Enterprise SP2 machine until we upgraded the BESR 2010 to SSR2011, after which the problem has now remained absent for the past few days. (Fingers are crossed.)

All versions of BESR & SSR are as up to date as possible and the servers are regularly updated and rebooted. We'd never seen this problem up until maybe a month or so ago so we're starting to suspect a Windows update as the culprit as we've not introduced anything new to the servers ourselves.

All servers are backing up to external USB drives of varying sizes and makes/models with plenty of free space available.

Historically when/if backups failed, there'd always an error message associated with the failure or at the very least, an event log entry to lead to an explanation.
Now when the scheduled backups fail, there's no error and even the VSS writers are in a happy state.

We've tried clearing the history and journal files before recreating the jobs afresh albeit to no avail.
The fixinstall.bat was also tried which made no difference.

As a temporary workaround we've implemented a batch file to restart the relevant Symantec services, the Backup Exec services, and the various services with VSS writers associated to them as well as performing an IISRESET, which seems to get the backup job automated again for a while. (A copy of this can be provided if need be.)

Hopefully the information I've provided will help in your quest for a resolution but please let me know if I can provide anything further to help as we'd also like to see the back of this one.

 

If anyone else is seeing this issue then please contribute to the discussion with any info you deem potentially useful as I don't think Symantec feel that this issue requires an urgent response given that the original article describes the severity as "Non-data threatening / major functionality".

e-charge.

Backup and Recovery
System Recovery
System Recovery (core)

3 Replies

  • criley's avatar
    criley
    Moderator
    13 years ago

    I assume you are referring to this?

    https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/issues/recovery-point-set-backups-intermittently-not-running-according-schedule

    Have you looked at the related TechNote (see below)?

    http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH185781

    Is this what you are seeing?

  • e-charge's avatar
    e-charge
    Level 3
    13 years ago

    Cheers Chris.

    That link never took me anywhere when I previously tried it but now it does, albeit to an article referencing VMs and Hyper-V. I'm happy to put my hands up and say that I don't understand what you mean.

    I can't see the relevancy of that article to the problem I'm having and the article you initiated.

    We're not using VMs or Hyper-V.

    Are you suggesting that disabling Deep C-States will resolve my issue regardless, bearing in mind that I'm seeing the issue across differing hardware, OS versions and SSR/BESR versions?
    (And only just recently I might add.)

    Thanks.

    e-charge

     

  • criley's avatar
    criley
    Moderator
    13 years ago

    As per the Microsoft article:

    In the eventlog of the machine we found Informational Events 1, Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-General, “The system time has changed to  ‎2011‎-‎11‎-‎04T11:21:47.725000000Z from ‎2011‎-‎11‎-‎04T11:21:41.976407900Z” several times every minute!

    This was the root cause. If you are not seeing these messages in the event logs, you have a different issue to the one mentioned in the article I wrote. If that is the case, your issue will need further investigation - I would recommend you open a case with support so we can start looking at your environment in more detail.

    Hope that helps.