Backup Exec 12 compare with 11D

[Kelvin_Lam]

Hello,

Any new feature of Backup Exec 12 using on backup Exchange 2007?

Thanks,
Regards,
Kelvin

[RahulM]

Yes,You can now perform Exchange GRT based backup on a FAT,Removable drive or network locations.

In BEWS 12 you can use the Granular Recovery Technology for Exchange, Active Directory and SharePoint servers allowing you to recover individual emails, user attributes or documents in seconds from a single backup. You can now run Granular Recovery backup jobs  to a remote or removable disk drive, or off to a fiber channel or iSCSI SAN environment.
It supports remote and removable backup-to-disk locations, Off-host support, and disk space management .

For more information on the Exchanhe agent and new features in BEWS 12 refer to the following links

NEW FEATURES

http://www.symantec.com/business/products/newfeatures.jsp?pcid=2244&pvid=57_1

About the Backup Exec Exchange Agent

http://support.veritas.com/docs/299880

[PSG]

That's great, but here's a specific question:

Does 12's implimentation of GRT address the "by design" behaviour of 11D wherein removable media accumulates endless quantities of IMG* folders until the disk is full?  Bottom line is that I expect if my job is configured to overwrite the B2D folder it's writing to, it does exactly that.  The listed recommended practices for 11D's GRT to removable media are unworkable in the enterprises I support.

[Ken_Putnam]

According to http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/299347.htm , v12 now operates like standard backups regarding overwriting old IMG/BKF folders/files

(Don't use Exchange, so I can't verify this from personal experience)

[PSG]

Thanks Ken.  Great news; I pushed my test server up to BE12 with all the nice liveupdate patches, smacked it into Exchange (2007) GRT and let it run for a couple days.

I'm getting a glorious collection of IMG folders, exactly as 11D created.

The document you linked to says that BE12 "by default" deletes IMG media every time a GRT-enabled backup runs.  It's not.  I'm thrilled... and not migrating any of my B2D customers to 12 until I get this worked out.

By the way, there's another article in Symantec's database about GRT recommendations.  They're identical to 11D recommendations, which again, are cumbersome and undesirable.

I'll now begin the dig to see if there's a setting that's stuck from my upgrade from 11D to 12 that's left me with non-default behaviour.  I'll probably end up calling support and losing a few hours of my life.

Thanks though, I hadn't seen that particular article to know that theoretically this is supposed to work.

[David_Kocmoud]

If you check your Alerts, do you see where it is actually deleting old IMG folder backups to make room for the new backups?  It does this for me.  Of course, you need to make sure your media set expiration is set short enough where there will be actual IMG folders available to be deleted to recover space.  Occassionally I do still run into a problem where it has no expired IMG folders to delete and the drive runs out of disk space and the B2D folder is listed as offline, but this happens rarely now.

Note that I have a separate drive exclusively set aside for IMG disk-to-disk backups, separate from my other disk-to-disk backups.

[PSG]

There's no sign that my test rig is even contemplating deleting IMGs.  I've got media overwrite protection set to none and all my media (BKFs and IMGs) all show overwritable.

[Ken_Putnam]

Just for grins, change the Global Overwrite Protection to either "Partial" or "Full", then set the media set OPP to 1 day and see what happens

Earlier versions with Global of NONE did some strange things, sometimes

[PSG]

Okay, this should be interesting.  For the record, for nostalgia's sake I'm of the habit of making a "Media Set 1".  I have just turned on global overwrite protection to Partial.  I moved over and checked the settings on MS1 and found it at defaults; infinite.  All my existing B2D BKFs and the IMGs I've acquired over the last few days had shifted from status "overwritable" to "infinite-don't allow overwrite".

I adjusted the settings on MS1 to 1 day.  The media all stayed protected.  Hrrrm.  I adjusted down to 1 hour.  It all stayed protected.  Again, hrrm.  Finally, I re-associated all the media with MS1, and they all lit up as overwritable.

We'll see if tonight's backup generates a new IMG or not.  Right now I have three days worth, so a total of 6 IMGs (Public Store & Private Store).  I'll let you folks know what the result is tomorrow.

Thanks for humouring me.  And if this turns out to work, my client-base will all be happy.  I've been avoiding GRT on my B2D customers since 11d was released.  And with Exchange 2007, legacy MAPI mode is deprecated.

[PSG]

We've got results, and they're good.  Last night's backup on the test rig auto-deleted a pair of IMG media.  The oldest, as it happens.  It then created a new pair, incremented the numbers, and did a proper backup.  This is very good news.

Thanks for the pointer, Ken.  I would never have thought to make this change, given the media all said it was overwritable in the first place.  There's a reason why you're a "hero".

[Eric_Sterner]

I hate to jump in, but by chance, if you reboot your server, do the IMG folders re-appear?  I have this very annoying problem with 11D where I have the disk reserve set and the IMG folders do delete so I have only 3 IMG folders at 1 time, but upon startup after rebooting, every single IMG folder re-appears from the beginning of setting this up(almost 200 folders now!).  Luckily only current continous data is getting dumped into each folder and not the original contents re-appear...I have not upgraded to v12 yet and would like to know if this is still a problem, or maybe someone has finally figured it out because I sure haven't.

Thanks!

[AGupta]

I am facing the same issue where in if we reboot the box img folders re-appear.
and filled with the current log files .
any suggestions???