Exchange Incremental stuck when "updating catalogs"

[Bruno_Ranzini]

Hello,
a customer of mine is having this problem: all Exchange Incremental backups (with GRT) get stuck at the end in the "updating catalogs" status.
After some time, the job fails saying strange things, like "Exchange Information Store is no available".
The full backup in the policy that runs weekly does not have any problem.
BEWS is fully patched as of today and disabling GRT is out of question.
Can anyone help me solve this problem?
Thanks!

[Andy_K]

We have the same issue and it is still open with symantec.  Intrestingly their fix was to run a defrag on exchange server and BE 11D server which we did and it worked for a few days but the issue returned (even though we set scheduled jobs on both servers to defrag the drives on a daily basis.

The other thing we found that temporairly fixes the issue is if you right click the exchange policy in BE 11d and choose 'delete jobs created by policy' and then right click again and choose new jobs using policy to recreate the jobs. - dont ask me why that one works...

Still awaiting a fix from symantec to solve this issue.

[Bruno_Ranzini]

I have now a case opened at Symantec and waiting for answer too.
Six days ago I sent the VxGather logs from both the Exchange server and the media server; the logs were captured while having the agents in debug mode.
Still waiting for an answer. If I'll receive an answer (possibly a problem solving advice) I'll post it here to inform other people that could be interested in the case.

[Andy_K]

Yeah we sent vxgather details over which covered a period when the jobs worked and when they failed (no changes made in between) which you would think would be enough to troubleshoot the issue pretty well but no...

ours works fine for a full backup on saturdays and incrementals work up until tuesday night when the speed of the job drops down to about 8mb and then after about 5 hours it fails with the error:

The job failed with the following error: The directory or file was not found, or could not be accessed.

Then (and this is the stupid part) right click on the exchange policy, choose delete jobs created by policy (this only deletes the jobs not the job templates so all your settings will still be there) then right click on the policy and choose new jobs using policy and the job will then complete successfully:

Exchange Backup Policy-Exchange daily incremental") Completed Successfully.

No changes in between....

We may employ a new member of staff just to work on backup exec at this rate!

[Bruno_Ranzini]

I sent VxGather info exactly ten days ago and I didn't receive any feedback about that.
I sent a couple of e-mails requesting at least a "working on it, please stand by" message, but nothing happened.
Too bad this new and, I must admit, great feature does not work at all......

[Andy_K]

did you try the fix above re: deleting the associated jobs from the policy and recreating them - that fix works for us and allows us to have successful backups until the next time it drops out again. (as a temporary fix until symantec come up with a proper solution may be install backup exec 12E or whatever the next version is called.

[Bruno_Ranzini]

No, I haven't tried yet, but probably will.
In the meantime I hope to receive some good news from India
I'll keep you informed in case.

[Andy_K]

hmmm... merry Christmas and a happy new year - especially if they find a fix before 2008!!

[Andy_K]

OK as expected the exchange incremental failed again last night (can always tell it is going to fail when it gets past midnight and no success notification has been received - it fails with the usual error:

The job failed with the following error: The directory or file was not found, or could not be accessed.

As always if i then right click the policy and choose 'delete jobs created by policy' and then right click again and choose 'new job from policy' the job runs successfully when i do a 'run now' and will continue to run successfully until next tuesday night (with a full on Saturdays in between)

Does anyone from Symantec have any input on this issue? 

[Bruno_Ranzini]

Hello there!
Still no news from Symantec, prolly the technician that is in charge is submitting the debug logs I sent him to Vishnu or something
Unfortunately I can't temporarily use your "escamotage" because every Tuesday my customer runs a duplicate job to save all data to tape. If I delete and recreate the jobs the duplicate won't recognize what has been already "copied" to tape and what has not been yet.
My customer is not that happy about this

[Andy_K]

So you duplicate your incrementals to tape as well as your full.  We have a full backup that runs on a saturday and when that completes an automatic duplicate to tape runs.  Our incrementals are stored on disk with a two week retention (anything older than two weeks will be restored from a weekly backup from tape)

[Rafael_DAuria]

Guys,

Could you give me more information about the environment:

-Operating Systems?

-Exchange/Windows versions and patch levels?

-BE SP2 installed?

I'll be doing some labs and may be I can help you..

See you

[Bruno_Ranzini]

Hello,

didn't know that SP2 came out.

Going to call my customer and tell him to install the SP and we'll see.

Merry Christmas (late) and Happy New Year to everybody!

[inot]

i've got the same problem. Do u know any progress about solve this problem?

[Bruno_Ranzini]

Hello,
an Italian Symantec technician told me that we have to wait for the next Hotfix (should be # 35), which should come out within a few days (really hope so) and should (too many "should" maybe...) solve this issue.
I've also been told that SP2, being just a collection of patchs, does not include anything about this.