Has anyone else had enough of this product? I have

[Philip_Pearson]

My job engine stops during backups

Live update does not work

Tape library goes offline and the updated drivers were withdrawn before they were made available

Licencing was almost impossible

Support is hopeless

Jobs fail on upgrade and need to be recreated with new selection lists

Backup to disk doesn't work if the destination drive size is too big

Having to dial in after hours to check what should be an automated process

Spending hours every day troubleshooting

Am I the only one who feels this way.

Exchange backups are unreliable and now they recommend we go back to legacy mailbox backups

Perhaps this forum needs a good bitch session to make symantec wake up

[Craig_Wentz]

+1

I feel that Symantec should go to a "how to tech support" class taught by Cisco. What a night and day difference!
I called tech support today for a critical problem. Critical means they get back to you in 2 hours!?! By the way, it was about 4 before I received a call.

If it makes you feel any better, their "Gold Support" for their anti-virus is worse.

[Jack_Dorsey]

This forum's had plenty of griping sessions all ready since the upgrade; I think they get the point.

Yes, there have been a slew of issues, but please remember that we're about fifty of probably thousands of users who are using this product, which isn't that bad of a success ratio.

It's not fun dealing with all this crap, however it's necessary to me because I need the encryption capabilities and to get that free? I'll deal with the issues.

What I find particularly frustrating is the fact that I did this the right way and upgraded our backup BEX server first, and that upgrade went flawless with no changes afterwards. After testing on our backup server, I upgraded our primary. Issues out the wazoo. So I agree with you, Philip, it is frustrating. Will Symantec do anything about it? Probably not. There aren't enough people having problems to necessitate it.

[Jack_Dorsey]

Cisco and Symantec tech support is a night and day difference because Cisco products rarely have problems, so yes, tech support experiences will be different. Look at it as calling the Maytag Man (Cisco) vs. calling your Volkswagen MkIV mechanic (Symantec). The Maytag Man will always pickup the phone, whereas the VW MkIV mechanic is steady fixing coil packs and window regulators. :D

Cheers, Jack

[Philip_Pearson]

You're too kind.

If you need more support staff you get more, you don't leave the customer hanging; all that does is creates ill will, people will then desert the product and not recommend it to others.

11d was not ready for release. As I have said before on other threads, my Arcserve installs work every day without fail or intervention.

[Dennis_Thornton]

Add:

Changing the schedule in a Job will result in the next start adding 24 hours.

[Kenneth_Sheppar]

Jack, I'll have to strongly agree with Phillip on this one. Sure, there's been tons of complaining, but keep in mind that this product is likely the highest part of a small to mid-sized business budget for disaster recovery and when you cannot depend on it even though you've spent thousands of dollars, I think the complaints are well deserved. Moreover, we offer Symantec FREE support research becasue we clearly layout and document our issues in real-world environments. This does allow them to reduce their support techs because the regular users end-up becoming an extension of their support.

Ken

[Dennis_Thornton]

I don't think this is a few user issue. If you check the dates on threads there is a lot of activity for a product that should be very reliable (it IS a backup software). Most of the posts are bug related and not "how do I?" posts.

[Philip_Pearson]

Further to this bitch session, my backups that started last week are coming up missed this week, nothing has changed?

[Simon_Sculthorp]

Two weeks ago we had good backups from 9.1 then we upgraded to 11d.

Since then I not one decent back up and my entire time taken up with these problems, most of which are already listed on this form. (Schedule bug, Exchange authentication, Sharepoint order etc)

Like idiots we paid for support which translates as hanging on the 'phone listening to dire music and losing the will to live.Silly me. I thought I'd get calls at the times arranged or within the SLA stated or an answer to my problem.

I know that Symantec has problems with the nasty software pirates, their database merge and their streamlined (sic) licencing portal, etc

And I don't care. Tough.

We, as customers, have paid a lot of good money for a product and/or services that should not have to be "tweaked" every day to see if they might perform the job they were designed for. It's your problem Symantec.

Sort it.

PS. Anybody any idea on getting money back??!

[Corey_Wilson]

I think everyone is feeling the same frustration Phil. This version was definantly not ready for release and no doubt about it, Symantec has lost thousands of prospective customers using older versions that have been reading these forums prior to investing in the upgrade.

I know for us, if we didnt have so much invested already I would definently be jumping ship. I can understand a few bugs and problems...but to this extent?! First, you know there is a large problem when items and functions that worked perfectly fine in previous releases now do not work or work with dramatic problems - the changes in scheduling being a very key one. Then you have features that just do not work at all like GTR. An advertised feature that dosent work at all. How was this product even released with these problems?

There are many more issues but these are some of the more common. EVen the backup transfer speed/performance of this release is not on par with earlier versions, atleast in our environment.

Symantec has a lot of work ahead of them to a) confirm to the customer base that they are aware of these serious glitches with this software and b) communicate a willingness to resolve all these issues which should not even be here to begin with, especially when they are copying a previous version of their 'own' software that worked fine prior to 11d.

[Kingsley_Mok]

I agree with Corey Wilson's comment on this.

Because of the GRT feature, we opted for the upgraded from 10d. What a disaster.

Instead of spending just one day to upgrade and test, it's been about a month and half now since the upgrade and troubleshooting. At time of this writing, I am *STILL* monitoring the situation with BE 11d.

11d have so many problems relating to data throughput and corruption in backup and restore.

1.) In a Weekly Full Backup, the job logs gets corrupted and cannot be displayed towards the end. How do we know whether the job was successful or not?

2.) Backup to Disk to a Storage Area Network on a dedicated and private IP is painstakingly slow and our network is on Gigalan. Ironically, backup to tape is fast, but I doubt it's integrity.

3.) When you modify an existing backup selection and then modify a backup job, the schedule is inadvertently rescheduled.

4.) When you backup just the MS Exchange Information Store, not everyone's mailbox show up in the restore when you drill down to a mailbox. You would have to use the legacy option to backup up the individual mailbox in order for restore to show the mailboxes. Then you wonder, what's the point in upgrading to 11d anyways??? It's a waste of money to upgrade.


All of these points are critical and merit the same priority. These are real world situation and Symantec should have done QA thoroughly on Backup Exec 11d before releasing it.

We're already thinking of returning the Backup Exec 11d and go back to Backup Exec 9 or 10d where it is more stable.

[Joshua_Small]

Hi,

I *was* a backup exec reseller.
When several sales related phone calls failed to put me in touch with anyone who spoke English, I gave up on the product.

Now I just support existing installs, which is bad enough.

[Philip_Pearson]

Say no more

[Shane_Vincent]

Tonight i start the *after hours* task of uninstalling 11d.. It has been 3 weeks since i installed it and i have only a handful of working backups...

I have had three cases logged with tech support both via DirectAssist and Phone and none of them solved any problems just wasted hours and hours of my time. The latest case was closed due to me not responding over the xmas break...WTF.

I have no option but to go back to 10.1

This is by far the worst software company i have had to deal with..

Thanks for nothing Symantec and yes the AV sucks too...

[Richard_Brown]

Thank you all for your posts. I just decided to wait awhile to upgrade to 11d, since 10d is working so well. Thankfully, the licensing portal didn't work for me this weekend, and I couldn't get the license keys..... ironic, isn't it?

I saw this same thing happen to ARCServe when it got bought by CA. And saw the same thing with pcAnywhere when it got bought by Symantec. There is a definite pattern here.... Symantec needs better tech support, since their primary products are critical (AV and Backup). Forums aren't good enough. Email support is needed at the very minimum.

I guess I now have a year under a 'support' contract to either find another product or for Symantec to release a working version of BE for Exchange 2007 / new servers.

[Kingsley_Mok]

Well,

There's always Acronis. http://www.acronis.com Believe it or not, some of the engineers who are at Acronis were formerly Symantec Ghost Engineers.

Acronis True Image works really well. Although it is still in our test environment, the results looks good so far. No hiccups yet. Backup and restore is FAST.

The only downside to Acronis, is that there is no way you can backup and restore individual mailboxes like in BE. It is either all or nothing.

I am still researching and doing QA on Acronis products. So far, it looks really REALLY good.

I may be putting in my recommendation for approval to go with Acronis once we have a semi-parallel system running between Symantec and Acronis, and after comparing the results. The downside, is that this will take another year to see the results.

[Dennis_Thornton]

Alas, the ability to restore individual mailboxes (with redirection) is a must for most environments.

[Kingsley_Mok]

Dennis,

Yes, this is very true and it is * A MUST * for ALL environment.

I've contacted Acronis and submitted in the suggestion. The last comment from them was that they are working on an option to have the ability to backup and restore individual mailboxes and not just the information store in their Acronis Enterprise and Server for Windows version.

[Steve_Young_2]

It seams that when there products work they work well. If they brake your up a creek without a paddle because it hours or days before you can get the support you pay good money for.