Backup events seem to have no record

[Tom_Cantlon]

I'm new to Backup Exec. Inherited this system lately as the computer consultant. It has a schedule to do a full backup every week night and the server is on all the time. When I look at the record of events all I see are the failed events, from a bad tape or some such. For most nights there is no record. Since there is no record I cannot get the details of what was backed up. I go to Job Monitor, Jobs List, Show All, and for the last several months there were a half dozen jobs that failed and that's all that shows. I read in the docs where, if there were successful events, I could get the details of what was backed up. This makes me uneasy that nothing is getting backed up. The interface is quite confusing. I would expect if it was failing every night it would say so. How do I verify what's going on?

Thanks

[Keith_Langmead]

Within the job monitor you should see a list of all the jobs which have run, whether successful or failed. Successful jobs are displayed in black while failed jobs are displayed in red. If the only jobs you're seeing are red failed jobs then I'd suspect that you're not actually getting any successful jobs which you're right to be worried about.

In the jobs list, those jobs which are listed, do the jobs show anything in the bytes count? Have a look at the job durations, have they been running for a long period of time, eg have they been sat there waiting for something for several days, which would explain why you're not seeing many actual jobs. If you look in the properties of the failed jobs you should be able to see information about what information was actually backedup if any, and hopefully any relevant error information which will explain why the jobs are failing.

[Ken_Putnam]

Sure soiunds like you are not getting any backups done

From the Restore Selection Pane, select Volume View rather than Media View, drill down to one of the disks on this server and see if any tape volumes are associated

[Tom_Cantlon]

Keith,

Thanks for the feedback. So looking at the details of some of the failed jobs gives some clues and some questions. Most of the failed jobs started and ended the same exact time, down to the same second. I assume either a program error or it didn't see the target tape drive existing or something. No reason given, no job log generated. Then there will be a gap of many days with no job listed at all, and then another job that failed as soon as it started.

One job started and ran for over a week before it was aborted manually, with 0 bytes backed up and no explanation and, again, no job log. I guess while this job was stuck, other jobs could not start. But that doesn't explain why on the jobs that fail as soon as they start there is no record of any job, failed or succeeded, started on the next day.

The current job started last night and has been running for 10 hours "loading media". Okay so we have either a tape problem or a drive problem on that one.

I hope you're not one of the programmers or something because I have to ask, an expensive, high end, server backup program that can't time out? That let's one job get stuck and prevent others from running? That can give no record of why most of them failed and no record at all for many days? Can this be for real?

At this point I'm going to do a bunch of manual backup, buy them a couple of big USB disks to rotate, and take a fresh look at what backup program to use. It's not your job to be a salesman but are there reasons to stick with an updated version of Backup Exec over say NovaStor or something else? I've never found one of these server backup programs I really like. Naturally I want a program that can try to backup open files, that can save a server state for disaster recovery. I don't really like NovaStor but at least it wouldn't have left me this much in the dark. Or is the backup build into Server (small business) 2003 good enough these days?

Many thanks

[Keith_Langmead]

First on the easy question, if memory serves correctly there is an option to automatically cancel the job after x amount of time if the job is still running, however I don't think it's enabled by default on the jobs, you need to select the relevant check box in the job properties. The option is definitely there in v10, and I'm almost certain it is in v9, but I can't get at an installation from here to confirm it or where exactly the option is I'm afraid. If you look through all the areas of the jobs options you should be able to find it.

For those jobs which ran for days you're right that they'd then prevent any future jobs from running, but the other ones which failed straight after starting are a puzzle. If you look in the Alerts section are there any errors listed in there? Slim chance but is there anything showing up for the relevant times in the event log?

All things considered if it was me I'd be very tempted to uninstall the whole thing, and re-set it up from scratch, since there are obviously some serious issues with your current installation. For one thing hopefully if there are problems with the hardware that might show up during the installation when it trys to find the device initially, and additionally you'd then get a chance to be properly aquainted with Backup Exec and know exactly how it has been setup, rather than relying on someone elses work in the past.