Backup Exec 2012 Service Pack 1a Released

[Turls]

Backup Exec 2012 SP1a has been released today. Backup Exec 2012 Service Pack 1a will replace/supercede the previously released Backup Exec 2012 Service Pack 1.

Here is a TECHNOTE that contains a list of known issues and enhancements resolved with Backup Exec 2012 revision 1798 Service Pack 1a.

[BradleySCFO]

You're not alone cord.  2012 seems to be getting worse rather than better.  God if we could afford another product I would have already migrated.

[vi-mikec]

I am wondering if there is really any comprehensive testing of these products and options before they are pushed out to clients? It doesn't seem so.

I am having the exact same problem as most everyone else. Live update says that SP1a is avaialble, does the download but fails to install on either my Central Admin Server or my Managed Media Server. Something about one of the programs has failed to run.

First SP1a??? Didn't SP1 just come out a little bit ago? Does this mean that SP1 was completely bogus and now has to be replaced by SP1a? Seems to be a little ridiculous.

On another issue, hope none of you let your licenses expire before installing one of these upgrades. Haven't been able to do dedup backups for 3 weeks while the idiots at Symantec figure out what piece of licensing I have to actually rewnew in order to get the correct key. Upgrading from 2010 to 2012 completely broke my backups and they DO NOT CARE! Call this one and that one. Open this ticket, they have to contact someone else, tell them how urgent it is, still noting happens. ARRRRGGGHHH!!!

Like someone else said, if I had the time and money I'd rip all the Symantec products out and replace.

The lesson learned here is: Do not upgrade a working version until at least a year or more after the new version has been released and it's up to SP2 or more. You cannot trust this software nor the licensing support or technical support they have. They will leave you out in the cold and blame it on the system.

[SG]

Vi-Mikec,

This could have been my post! I absolutely agree. The licencing is even more worse than the product. I could write a book how many issue I already had regarding licenses. My company was meanwhile listed as 6 different companies with 6 different customer numbers as the company name was written in 6 different ways. It took my ages to correct this...

The update notifications (if I receive them) does always only cover some of my licenses... the support itself get also worse since Symantec moved it to India. Nearly no chance anymore to get German support... the time to get a call back can be up to 3 days, also for critical issue and so on.

I believe the best version of Backup Exec was 9.1 because Backup Exec was a product of Veritas then... and the Support (at least for European users) was in Europe with native speaking support people.

Symantec should really learn and understand the customer needs!

Best regards,
 SG

[mtkinf]

After reading this thread, I think I can live with the problems I have with my current 2012 install....

[zak2011]

I have been facing issues running weekly duplicate jobs. If you dont give the option to run the job immediately after the backup set and if it is set on a schedule,the weekly duplicate job does not run. This has been going on for more than two to three weeks now.I presumed that installing SP1a would resolve this issue but it did not. I got an update from Symantec support right now.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH190980

Thanks!

[BradleySCFO]

I'm having insane amounts of problems with Dedupe storage after SP1a.  I get robotic library errors on multiple jobs.. and media errors on others.  Symantec says to go in and use SGMon to find the offending media but you can no longer see the OST files when you look into the dedupe storage like you could in 2010.

My backup jobs haven't worked right for over 4 months.... this is truly a nightmare..  I thought SP1 was a slight improvement then SP1a just broke everything SP1 did that gave me some hope.

[EliasA]

What are the error messages you are receiving?  If you have an SGMON log if you can send that to me for review to assist.

[BradleySCFO]

Well this weekend was another complete clusterf*ck in terms of backups..

Here are just a few of the errors.. given that a majority of the job logs for the failed jobs don't even appear.

 e0000f09 - An error occurred when writing to the Backup Exec database. A synthetic backup of this resource will not include the data backed up by this operation until the next full or incremental backup of this resource.

 Storage device "SCFO Deduplication:5" reported an error on a request to rewind the media.

Error reported:

A device attached to the system is not functioning.

V-79-57344-34036 - An unknown error has occurred.

V-79-57344-33861 - The media operation was terminated by the user.

Storage device "SCFO Deduplication:5" reported an error on a request to write a media location identifier (file mark).

Error reported:

A device attached to the system is not functioning.

V-79-57344-34036 - An unknown error has occurred.

I'll try to run an SGMon tonight while I run some jobs.  At the moment our MMS system drive is full with logs that were enabled due to one of the 3 tickets I have open with Symantec at the moment.  I feel like I could open a couple more due to the new issues with SP1a.. but I honestly don't have time to even do so.

[EliasA]

A couple of points based on the information you indicated here...

The message of "Failure to rewind a dedup store", this sounds like a potential disk corruption.  If you can send me (one of) your Support Case ID #, I can have someone contact you.

It sounds like you are also trying a synthetic backup to a dedup store, is that correct?  (If so, this is not supported)

[Axel_H_sken]

I cannot even install SP1a, I am running into an errormessage:

Product: Symantec Backup Exec - Update 'Symantec Backup Exec (Service Pack 1a)' could not be installed. Error code 1603. Windows Installer can create logs to help troubleshoot issues with installing software packages. Use the following link for instructions on turning on logging support: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=23127


For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Does anybody have an idea? I already searched Symantec Connect and the web, but nothing seems to fit really to this problem?

Thanks
Axel

[EliasA]

Please take a look at this technote: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH181970&actp=search&viewlocale=en_...

[Axel_H_sken]

thx, but the solution provided by Symantec didn´t solve the installation problem.

Since 3 weeks, BE 2012 is not able to do a simple backup, even the so called Experts from Symantec is not able to fix it? The experts (I was in contact with two of them), just ran live update and clicked around .. and told me they had to close the ticket due to Windows VSS problems? 

This and the fact that our Backup solution is not able to run a simple full backup, is just strengthen my intention of going to another product.
 

[EliasA]

Axel, can you send me the case # for your contact with our support staff and I will follow up on this.

[zak2011]

Quite a strange issue with Exchange backups. After SP1a was installed, daily incremental jobs are failing. Tried doing a non GRT backup and it works. However backing up with GRT fails. Contacted Symantec support and tried a couple of things however the case has been escalated to Advanced Technical support. Its pretty scary now to install any major service packs after other user experiences and what i have been through ever since release of SP1.

[vi-mikec]

Hi. Just wondering if anyone has installed BE2012, SP1 and SP1a and have no remaining issues? I am scared to put on SP1a due to all the problems reported here. My BE2012 with SP1 seems to be working but is not completing all the jobs in one night like BE2010 R3 did. It seems to take longer. 

Some other issues:

• Duplicate jobs fail or just seem to stall
• Sluggish performance of the console. It doesn't display the active jobs for a long while when you first start it and takes a long time when editing or saving jobs sometimes having to hit "disconnect" when tired of waiting for it.
• The console says there are 4 active jobs but I don't see the jobs anywhere??? Where are they?
• BE2010 allowed you to see all jobs that were running in one screen.
• Opening each server individually, I see a job which says "Active" but doesn't show the status. I guess this is one of the missing jobs I'm looking for but what exactly is it doing and how much longer is it going to be running? It's work time now, it should be finished.
• I only want to do Exchange backup with GRT on a weekly full backup not on my daily because it takes too long. Doesn't seem to be a way to do this without creating a seperate job for the incremental and then this automatically creates another full backup that I don't want and that I cannot delete. (Changed it to non recurring so this is ok but not what I wanted).
• When editing a job, there is no "X" to delete an unwanted job if it is the first one in the list. (like the full I do not want).

Would SP1a fix any of this? Doesn't look like it from the Tech note about it.

[JuergenB]

Hi,

i have a lot of problems with BE 2012 and SP1a.

I have some engineer fix updates received from symantec, these should work better (they said).
But the fixes doen´t work at all, they don´t know where to look at.

It looks like they have kicked the old school programmers and got a new team for BE2012

Some issues

• Duplication of LTO2 to Disc fails, jobs get stalled, the bengine crashes.
• Syntethic Backup fails, the full and some incremental are running, then the bengines crashes.
• Agent aren´t able to backup SQL 2012 Servers, access denied (service account has admin and sysadmin rights on the server.
•  Even with SP1a i can´t view some of the backup jobs, the server view is empty.
• Jobs are stalled, sometimes recovered but they are not working.
• Backup Speed
• All other bugs i missed (there are a lot more).

I tried Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2012 a month ago, even with no knowledge about the product the first Protection of some server are working after 2 hours ...

With no crashed at all with DPM 2012

On Thursday i have business meeting with a customer, he is changing from his old windows 2003 / SQL 2005 Server Clusters to a new hardware design. (About 4-5 TB in Data). 80 SQL CPU Licences ..

They used to have Backup Exec 2010.

The new server cluster will have Windows 2008 R2, Windows SQL 2012 Enterprise with HA..

I will dissuade him not to use BE2012 at all.

BE 2012 is a great disappointment.

[dlsmithjr]

Had this problem, until I ran Backup exec 2012 as administrator.  Right click on icon and select "Run as administrator", then  do the live update from within Backup Exec. 

Once I did this, it worked.

[Alainros]

I also have problems with my backup exec 2012 installation on a win 2008 r2 32 bit server:

• Live update can't install sp1a (package corrupted)
• When i backup a 2003 r2 file server with vss tecnology, the cleaning of the snapshot fail and deleting all the snapshot scheduled.
• I have a lot of problems with the backup of virtal machines (esx 4.1), the test credential with the root account is successful but when the backup job start can not backup vms and retourn the error "Unable to open a disk of the virtual machine.
  VixDiskLib_Open() reported the error: You do not have access rights to this file"

With BE 2010 R3 I have not had any problems, standard installation (next, next, next ) and the backups worked without problems...

ps. sorry for my enlish, is not my native language... 

[Rogo]

Ok... what's up here...??  Did everyone's SP1a install suddenly start working did another(s) hotfix come out after SP1a to fix all these issues?

I tried SP1 with horrible results much like the rest here. Then tried SP1a with even worse results and again much like everyone here. So I'm back to using BE2012 base where I can at least get a backup of all my servers and Exchange 2010 cluster.

So what's the deal Symantec? Has all this been fixed, has SP1a been stabilized and made safe and useable yet? What is going on?

[vi-mikec]

I have put on SP1, SP1a and a hotfix which just was released a few days ago. The system is still very broken. Backups are very slow when they do work, strange media errors are popping up saying that media in a slot is in an invalid format and to reinitialize it even though I am using disk backup with dedup so there are no slots. It's not a tape drive.  Jobs sit there without moving for hours, dup jobs fail with unknown error, it shows 8 active jobs but when I look at the server view it doesn't show any running jobs. Opening up each server one by one I find there are jobs but they only say "Active" and show no status. If I try to open the job it gives me the change job screens not a status.  I feel these are hung jobs and am having to end/restart services everyday to end all the crap in hopes I can get a good backup that night but hasn't happened yet.I got a full backup this weekend but almost all of the dup jobs to my CAS server failed so no offsite storage of this backup yet.

I have a ticket open and worked with several people and now it supposed to be escalated up to the next level. No one has called me back for 2 days. Just called in again today to request a call back. This is a seriously broken product. It has not worked correctly since upgrading to 2012. Last working version was 2010 R3. If I get fired over not being able to recover my environment I think I'll sue them for selling a product that they obviously know does not work. It's been 2 months and still not a 100% working system.

People are probably just getting tired of talking about it and switched to another product which does work.