Backup Exec 2012 no longer has follow symbolic links option

[Roeland]

I've recently migrated my jobs from BE 2010 to BE 2012.

All went fine until recently, when I've changed the different Linux backup jobs.

I'm guessing that -seen 'follow symbolic links' is no longer an option in BE 2012- it took the 2010 settings and migrated everything correctly. But when I've changed the job BE stored it in a 2012 format, stripping the old config.

Is there a way to reactivate this, currently I'm only backing up a file instead of all the directories referenced by the symbolic link ?

If contacted Symantec several times, spent some time on the phone with a technician, but they did not come up with a solution.

best regards

[criley]

I can confirm this option was removed in BE 2012.

I don't know the reason why though..

[Roeland]

We finally came up with a solution ourselves, but STRONGLY SUGGEST symantec to add the option again in the GUI (!)

In the BE mssql DB (BEDB) all job options are stored, but hashed or somewhat mixed up. In BackupJobInstance the columns BackupOptions and BackupOptions2 define these, and the first moreover defines incr vs full, whereas BackupOptions2 stores the other (ao symbolic links). Note that this is just an estimated guess for no documentation on the DB and it's tables is available.

By restoring the DB to a point right after the migration we were able to retrieve the BackupOptions2 value allowing SymbolicLinks, and fixed our backups with the following query (note that 'unix%' is part of the description we've set, and not a default value for linux backups) :

UPDATE BEDB.dbo.BackupJobInstance SET BackupOptions2=23470080 WHERE SetDescription LIKE 'unix%'

I'm pretty sure each time a job is changed BE will reset the value, and we'll be re-running the query each time... This solution is rather specific to our case (other options set by BackupOptions2), and should not be used without precaution. 

Any comment on this by Symantec ?