I have just upgraded our BESR from version 8.02 to the new 8.5 that I was made aware of via an email from upgradecenter@symantec.com. My installation has happily worked until I performed this upgrade, none of my previous backups are recognised in the status view in the BESR console and I keep getting a pop up message warning "One or More Recovery Points are NOT available at their locations". I thought it was because I needed to carry out a new baseline which I duly did and it completed but now it reports the same for the one I carried out this morning. I have read a support article (Document ID: 310701) that deals with this issue but the resolution is to upgrade to version 8.5. For your information BESR 8.5 is running on a Windows 2003 Server Standard and backup to 2 different NAS boxes, 1 is a Buffalo Terastation the other is an Iomega StorCentre Pro 150d. Is anyone else experiencing issues and if so is there a resolution or do I need to remove 8.5 and reinstall 8.02.

It sounds like your backup history was corrupted during the upgrade. In order to fix this, the job history and backup jobs will need to be deleted and recreated. 1. Stop the Backup Exec System Recovery service 2. Browse to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Backup Exec System Recovery\ and delete all .PQH files in the "History" folder and all .PQJ files in the "Schedule" folder.4. Rename the folders containing the backups, adding _OLD to the end. 5. Start the BESR service 6. Setup your backup jobs with desired configuration and storage locations 7. Let jobs run. Make sure that you rename all backup folders to ensure that you don't overwrite previous backups. This will break all links to the older backups and they will have to be deleted manually if you would like to have them deleted, BESR will not be able to see them or delete them automatically.Message Edited by Jon_R on 10-10-2008 04:39 PM

Thank you Jon_R for the solution, so far it appears to be working but I have one question, I carried out a test backup this morning but when viewing the status overview the backup appears with a blue circle with a question mark in it. I clicked on the link in the top right of the console window that was for 'legend' but this icon is not even listed in the help for the product. Can you or anyone else enlighten, is the backup OK to use or indeed completed satisfactorily. Willie Footnote: The icon has now turned to the normal green circle with the tick in it. I am assuming that there is an issue reading the backup status while another backup job is running to the same destination folder. Software working as normal again.Message Edited by MoonCat on 10-13-2008 11:06 AM

Thought I would post an update to my previous post, I have just completed doing a baseline of our whole server data set now and the status page reports all drives backed up but all the icons within the calender have this blue circle with a white question mark and the pop up has started again reporting "One or more Recovery Points are NOT available at their locations" Any further help would be most grateful. Willie

The BESR agent(s) may be loosing their continuous connection to the Buffalo Terastation & Iomega StorCentre Pro 150d storage locations. What kind of connection do we have to these two NAS devices? You can open a ticket with Symantec Technical support where you can then send in SAS log files generated using the following utility: http://www.apparentnetworks.com/sas/310/ to test the connection between the agent(s) and the storage devices. Secondly on a test system exhibiting the same symptom, if backing up to a simple window share consonantly (i.e. Advance | Backup jobs | Right click on job | run job with options | Full -or-incremental) if you begin to see the same symptoms again. If not we are looking at either a network or NAS related issue; however if you do see if selectively starting up the system using the MSCONFIG utility with just essential Microsoft & BESR related services picks up the older job files. BTW, in the *.PQH files now on this client, opening them up while our services are stopped, do they show what image files 'should' be present at the storage devices, and are those files really still being stored by the NAS?

I am having same issue after BESR 8.5 upgrade. I uninstalled my BESR 7.0 and freshly installed BESR 8.5 with out saving jobs or histroy from BESR 7.0. I don't think it is NAS related issue. Because BESR 7.0 ran for a year on same NAS with out any issue. Please let me know if you have found solution. Thanks

"One or More Recovery Points are NOT available at their locations"

17 Replies

Jon_R
Level 6
16 years ago
It sounds like your backup history was corrupted during the upgrade. In order to fix this, the job history and backup jobs will need to be deleted and recreated.

1. Stop the Backup Exec System Recovery service

2. Browse to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Backup Exec System Recovery\ and delete all .PQH files in the "History" folder and all .PQJ files in the "Schedule" folder.

4. Rename the folders containing the backups, adding _OLD to the end.

5. Start the BESR service

6. Setup your backup jobs with desired configuration and storage locations

7. Let jobs run.

Make sure that you rename all backup folders to ensure that you don't overwrite previous backups. This will break all links to the older backups and they will have to be deleted manually if you would like to have them deleted, BESR will not be able to see them or delete them automatically.
Message Edited by Jon_R on 10-10-2008 04:39 PM
MoonCat
Level 2
16 years ago
Thank you Jon_R for the solution, so far it appears to be working but I have one question, I carried out a test backup this morning but when viewing the status overview the backup appears with a blue circle with a question mark in it. I clicked on the link in the top right of the console window that was for 'legend' but this icon is not even listed in the help for the product. Can you or anyone else enlighten, is the backup OK to use or indeed completed satisfactorily.

Willie

Footnote: The icon has now turned to the normal green circle with the tick in it. I am assuming that there is an issue reading the backup status while another backup job is running to the same destination folder. Software working as normal again.
Message Edited by MoonCat on 10-13-2008 11:06 AM
MoonCat
Level 2
16 years ago
Thought I would post an update to my previous post, I have just completed doing a baseline of our whole server data set now and the status page reports all drives backed up but all the icons within the calender have this blue circle with a white question mark and the pop up has started again reporting "One or more Recovery Points are NOT available at their locations"

Any further help would be most grateful.

Willie
David_F
Level 6
16 years ago
The BESR agent(s) may be loosing their continuous connection to the Buffalo Terastation & Iomega StorCentre Pro 150d storage locations. What kind of connection do we have to these two NAS devices? You can open a ticket with Symantec Technical support where you can then send in SAS log files generated using the following utility: http://www.apparentnetworks.com/sas/310/ to test the connection between the agent(s) and the storage devices.

Secondly on a test system exhibiting the same symptom, if backing up to a simple window share consonantly (i.e. Advance | Backup jobs | Right click on job | run job with options | Full -or-incremental) if you begin to see the same symptoms again. If not we are looking at either a network or NAS related issue; however if you do see if selectively starting up the system using the MSCONFIG utility with just essential Microsoft & BESR related services picks up the older job files. BTW, in the *.PQH files now on this client, opening them up while our services are stopped, do they show what image files 'should' be present at the storage devices, and are those files really still being stored by the NAS?
Cetnamys
Level 3
16 years ago
I am having same issue after BESR 8.5 upgrade. I uninstalled my BESR 7.0 and freshly installed BESR 8.5 with out saving jobs or histroy from BESR 7.0. I don't think it is NAS related issue. Because BESR 7.0 ran for a year on same NAS with out any issue. Please let me know if you have found solution. Thanks
mopperle
Level 3
16 years ago
Same problem here after upgrading from BESR 8.03 to 8.5. Tried the suggestions above with no result. the icon in the systemtray show "Status OK" but when openning BESR I get the same message as others.

Backing up to my NAS device (Buffalo Terrastation) worked before with BESR 7 and 8.0 without any problems!

Otto
Cetnamys
Level 3
16 years ago
This issue is also not reolved with BESR 8.5 SP1 update. I also did the fresh install of 8.5 sp1 same issue re-occured. So I think the NAS devices, back job and histroy files are not the culprit. One intresting thing I noticed is excactly at 5 minutes interval the calender icon turns from blue to green (for 3 seconds) and then back to blue ... so on. May be this could be a good clue to the Symantec engineers. What process or program is refreshing every 5 minutes? Please fix this.
MoonCat
Level 2
16 years ago
Firstly apologies for the delay in responding as been busy with other issues not related to BESR but was comfortable in the knowledge that the backups were working (as I tested restoring from them) just the console was not displaying the status correctly.

I currently backup to 2 NAS devices, originally I was having issue with both of them but it is now only the Buffalo Terrastation device, for information the other is an Iomega StorCentre Pro 150d. For the record my console is displaying exactly the same behavior as yours "Cetnamys" in that the colour changes on the icon every 5 mins or so, additionally if you hover your cursor over the back ups in the calendar it still shows the times when the backups perform. Is BESR reading this information from the NAS device or just the local job history file?

I agree that it is some piece of code within BESR that has changed as everything was fine until the 8.5 upgrade. Because of this I have advised the 6 other locations within my company to delay the install until further notice.
David_F
Level 6
16 years ago
With 8.5 comes some performance keys, see if teh collective you have better results backing up to the network shares once one or more of these performance keys has been applied (even on SP2 releases)

BESR 8.5 Backup Performance – http://support.veritas.com/docs/307579

Thanks
Cetnamys
Level 3
16 years ago
This is a known issue. Will have to wait for the patch to be released.
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/310701.htm