Duplication, best practices, general questions - Help!

[macinslaw]

Let me start by saying that I have been asking questions on here for quite some time with regard to 12.5 and have had very few answers that helped me.  This is my last ditch effort to get assistance from someone who really can help.

First, I refuse to contact Symantec unless I absolutely have no other alternative for I can rarely understand the foriegn helpdesk (whom always states they are in Atlanta whenI ask to speak to an American - they really need to stop this practice...generates more animosity).

That being said.....

We are running a windows 2000 server running backup exec 12.5 connected via SCSI to a LTO 3 8 tape robotic device.  We are running D2D to an iSCSI 12 Tb array.

We are also running 5 virtual servers on ESXi (version before vSphere).

All servers (other than the VM Host) are Windows 2000 or 2003 servers.

There is no chance in the near future of upgrading to BE 2010 due to the server 2003 OS requirement.

Okay:
1st question:  All attempts to set up duplication in my templates fail.  Recently I began to wonder if it is due to the selection set being too large.  Is there a limit for duplication?  (Small jobs duplicate just fine while my main backup fails the dupe to tape)

2nd:  Is there a way to automatically remove backup jobs in a policy once they become a certain number of days old?  I am out of space on my 12 Tb array.

3rd:  Can 1 and 2 be combined? - I would like my backups to go like this:

Dailies backup to Disk - then to tape,
weeklies backup to disk - then to tape, removing the past week's dailies
Monthlies do the same as above
Quarterlies do the same as above,
Yearly same again.

4th:  Without pointing me toward a KB article, manual, other other documentation from symantec or VMWare, can anyone help me be able to backup my vmdk files on my VMWare Host?  I have read every article, every manual, everything people have steered me toward, and nothing outlines the entire procedure, VMWare outlines only so much and Symantec only so much, and I have attended classes on both 12.5 and VMWare administration.

5th:  My Exchange backup is failing with an error telling me to install MS tools, which I have done.  Any other ideas?

6th:  My SQL backups are failing, it seems that the backups are unable to backup the logs and such.  Again, I need major assistance.

7th:  Keep getting AOFO errors in my backups telling me that this option fails.

Any and all assistance is appreciated.

Thanks.

-Scott

[macinslaw]

Are you kidding?  No one?!  None of you can help me? 

[JT_T]

I'm not kidding, and don't get me wrong, i seriously don't want to be mean.

But, as there's so many open questions and problems with your backup infra, maybe you should seriously consider for paying to someone, to get your backups running successfully.

There's nothing more important than running successfully backups for having successfully restores, and in your situation, you should pay more attention to that and have someone to correct all those issues.

[Ken_Putnam]

2nd:  Is there a way to automatically remove backup jobs in a policy once they become a certain number of days old?  I am out of space on my 12 Tb array.

3rd:  Can 1 and 2 be combined? - I would like my backups to go like this:

Dailies backup to Disk - then to tape,
weeklies backup to disk - then to tape, removing the past week's dailies
Monthlies do the same as above
Quarterlies do the same as above,
Yearly same again.

First.  make sure that all your B2D jobs are Overwrite, not Append

Use different media sets for each job (Daily, Weekly, Monthly etc)

For each media set, set your OPP appropritately.  ie:
if you want to keep dailies for a day only, set the OPP to 12 hours
for the weeklies, set OPP to 6 days
for the monthlies, set OPP to 27 days   etc

Also from Tools\Media Management, make sure that the option to "reuse overwriteable media in the target media set befor scratch media"   is selected.  If the other "use scratch media" is selected, BackupExec  will fill the entire volume before reusing any BKF fiels

use the templates provided to setup B2D2T.  As soon as the backup-to-Disk job finishes, the Duplicate to Tape will start. (Make sure you do a Duplicate, not a standard backup.)


5th:  My Exchange backup is failing with an error telling me to install MS tools, which I have done.  Any other ideas?

is the BackupExec service account an Exchange Administrator?
 

6th:  My SQL backups are failing, it seems that the backups are unable to backup the logs and such.  Again, I need major assistance.

Is the BESA a SQL Admin?

7th:  Keep getting AOFO errors in my backups telling me that this option fails.

Where is AOFO failing.  It is recommended that you put your database backups in separate jobs and do NOT include AOFO for those jobs