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