Impressions of BackupExec 2012

[Bulbous]

Is it just me, or does anyone else absolutely HATE the redesign of Backup Exec? I have worked with BE since version 8, and I have become acutely familiar with the menus, where everything is, and how it works.

This redesign of the UI reminds me of the differences between Microsoft Office 2003 and Office 2007, only much worse. Menus are now hidden behind other menus, and everything has a completely counter-intuitive feel.

At first, I thought that the feeling would pass as I grew more familiar with the product, but in fact my dislike has grown as I have found more issues.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

[CraigV]

...good enough for an Article or a Blog (at the very least!)...

[AnKirby]

Due diligence is all very well, but at some point our hands will be forced into upgrading as BE2010 becomes unsupported.

Should everyone wait until then before jumping ship?

[JoeyM]

I concur with ALL THE COMMENTS here. Everyone has a vailid point.
I have been doing nothing but struggling with BE2012 since the day I installed it. Hence, my backups have become totally random and unreliable.
I.E - Scheduled a job to run every Tuesday at 11PM. Yesterday was Tuesday, not only did the job fail to run, it didn't even record an event or log a failure. Yea, that's real progress.

I have contacted symantec support twice. Initially to determine if I could schedule consecutive backup jobs without having detailed schedules for specific time windows, etc. They did not even mention server groupings, hence, they don't even know the product they are selling and Supporting. I confirmed I cannot schedule one sequential FULL BACKUP. More work, more pain, no FUN ! 

Additionally, you receive NO WARNINGS about trial agents, the job simply fails due to licensing. Would have been nice to know BEFORE it actually fails. Then it seems extraordinary difficult to determine which servers have the correct licensed agents installed, I still have not found a way.

Overall, this product blows chunks long and hard.

I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND NOT USING BE2012 .

[Keith_W__Hare]

The biggest issue I have with Backup Exec 2012 is that it eliminates the ability to use the backup architecture I've been using for decades.

My view of backup is:

Goal: be able to recover from a major disaster or loss of critical individual files in a reasonable amount of time.

Strategy:

1. on a regular basis, make a copy of files, systems, etc.
2. Use a media that can be moved offsite
3. Retain the offsite media for a sufficient time period

Technique:

1. Use a LTO-4 tape drive on a backup server
2. Backup everything that fits in a 12-14 hour period
3. If the backup exceeds the available time window, look at incremental/differential, less frequent backups, faster tape drive, etc.

This is pretty much the backup architecture I’ve used in a variety of computing environments over the last 35 years, with variations of the removable media device and backup software. This architecture fit pretty well with the BE2010 Job-centric model.

The BE2012 model rejects this view of backup and replaces it with something else. I’m still trying to figure out what that something else is.

I’m looking for something that gives me the high level view of how BE2012 expects backups to work, the BE2012 architecture. What are the goals? What are the Strategies? The expected techniques?

The Backup Exec 2012 Administrators Guide reiterates all of the options that are available through the BE2012 media center. It does not explain the architecture for doing backups. The reference material I’ve found focuses on individual pieces, not the overall architecture for doing backups. The videos are even less useful.

Everything I’ve found so far focuses on the individual commands, the user interface, the low level pieces. It’s like trying to figure out the shape of the ocean by examining the individual grains of sand on the beach.

If someone has a link to a document does a reasonable job of explaining the backup architecture that BE2012 expects, please post it.

Keith
 

[Jimmy_Mac]

This matches our strategy exactly.

2012 will not work for this logical process as far as I have been able to find.

What I believe Symantec has dismissed is the fact that most small businesses cannot invest in DAS or NAS systems and may actually be in areas where fiber to the NOC only exists on Fantasy Island. I have clients who out of logistical necessity, MUST backup their servers to a tape device for off-site storage and archival. Some are on fractional T1, some on ADSL, Some on SDSL, One is even still on an ISDN. Backup to the cloud is not only impractical, it's nearly impossible.

Investing in upgraded hardware simply to accomodate BEWS 2012, is, to simplify, INANE when all older versions of the product have been able to provide the necessary functionality.

Symantec, Fix it or we have no option but to abandon your product(s).

[hazmat09]

To See All Your Jobs & Status

• Go to Backup & Restore tab
• Double click "All Servers" which takes you to all your jobs
• Sort by status
• If you configure your column view, you can see everything from this view. Including "On Hold" which will show in the "Job Status" column

For your Tape issue, you need to enable alert options in Alert categories. You needed to do this in Backup Exec 2010 as well. 

• Click Main Menu from top left
• Configurations & Settings
• Alerts and notifications
• Enable whatever alerts you want
• You'll also see this on the HOME Screen under "Active Alerts"

[hazmat09]

I agree, At first I was ticked off, but think of it this way. If I had a job that backed up 20 servers and one of those server backups slows to a crawl or hangs, that affects the entire job. I prefer the server centric model after using it for a few weeks. There are still some things they glaringly left out that can be addressed in a service pack down the road.

Now, I take the 20 servers, back them up 5 at time, spanned over the evening, and my backup window has shrunk immensely.

For restores, I just select the server I'm wanting to restore the data from, instead of drilling through the job that had 20 servers combined into it. That IMO is much simpler. We are using a DEDUP folder to disk, so mulitiple backups concurrently is no issue.

I'd like to see the option of clicking on your tape media and restoring from the drill down there. That to me was a big oversight. You can view what's on the tape, why not make a context menu that allows you to restore from the same window?

[hazmat09]

Attached is some docs I found useful trying to figure things out. The whole Selection List, Policy, Job migration to stages was a bit confusing. The duplicate immediately to tape from fulls/diff jobs wasn't explained very well and I figured it out on my own.

Here's the post I did on my process - https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/impressions-backupexec-2012#comment-7112911

I have separate jobs for DFS data and Hyper-V. With Hyper-V I can backup mulitple servers "VM's" in that one job using the HV agent.

I had one job, backing up around 20 different servers. Now each job is is dedicated to one server. To disk I can now backup 5 servers or more concurrently, reducing my backup window dramatcially.

I then have a stage that duplicates immediately to tape once the "To Disk" jobs finish. I have a TL 2000 tape library, but I can only do one job at a time to tape. All "to tape" jobs backup quickly as it's referencing the "To disk" data and not going across the LAN again to backup that same data on the server side. If the tape drive is busy, the queued job will just show tape drive busy and queue up to start once the current running to tape job is finished.

We do fulls one day of the week and diffs the rest.

• Individual jobs for each server
• benefit - concurrent jobs to disk if you have that option, easier to restore IMO, shortens backup window
• Selection lists, policy, jobs are all done in something called stages. Actually much easier "once you understand it" than the previous method. Although some improvements are needed in the process
• Backup to tape is still the same. I'm using LTO3, so you're better off performance wise than me with LTO4. I don't see any changes other than the view of the storage section. Also viewing inventory, merge, scan, clean jobs have to be viewed under storage, double click “Autoloader” then click jobs to see status
• I backup all our data within a 10 hour period. Once we have our DEDUP folder on a proper enclosure that supports the DEDUP api, that window will drastically reduce
• If you can, I'd recommend implementing DEDUP and duplicate to tape. You can store many months of data onsite, making those recoveries of legacy data much easier. Also the obvious benefits of shrinking your backup window.

Hope that helps you out.

[hazmat09]

Click Search, type view net, click '"view network connections"

done

[GregOfBE]

Bringing disk up to speed and not forcing it into the tape model was an important goal of BE 2012. In BE 2010 and prior releases, disk was treated like "virtual tape". When backing up to disk and de-dup, you had to create and choose a media set and you had media options on the backup. When you needed to see what data was on the disk location, you saw "virtual tapes" in the b2d folder. To all of the long-time users, they just got used to this, but imagine trying to use the product for the first time…it would be strange.

That brings us to another important goal of the release…bring the great technology of Backup Exec and its ability to work with tape, disk and cloud to new users too.  I can't count how many times, I heard of stories where people would evaluate Backup Exec for the first time and walk away saying "Its much more complex than what I need". When you talk to them and learn their environment - you'd find out - its exactly what they need - in terms of the underlying capabilities. But, from their perspective, it was far too difficult to use. This would happen time and again.

As for what the "intent" was. By moving to a per-server model, we gain many advantages that we could not otherwise have. Some of these are:

* Because you pick a server first before creating a backup, we know the resources on the server and, so, can limit options to what is actually on the server and to what is relevant.

* Configuring client-side deduplication can be done on the server backed up where it makes more sense than having some item in the "devices" tab.

*  If a single-server was down or offline during a backup, you can retry just that one server's backup. So greater granularity in dealing with failures.

* Whether backing up to disk OR tape, you can queue up many jobs and let the software push as much data to your target devices as possible. You control concurrency (the # of concurrent jobs writing at once) on disk with settings in the Storage view. For tape, your # of devices and device pools limits concurrency. If your hardware improves, you can increase concurrency and you'll automatically push more data at once to shorten the backup window.

Hazmat09 above stated that he is backing up to disk and copying to tape. By setting up his b2d2t scheme with media sets and targets for the tape portion, he is able to push data to disk as quickly as possible and because the duplicates to tape will kick off as soon as their backups are done, data can get to tape possibly more quickly too.

Having said that, those backing up direct to tape is important too. We didn't intend to exclude those folks. As I said in a prior post, there was a bug where multi-server jobs with "Overwrite media" were set, the upgrade left the "Overwrite media" option set. This is bad for tape jobs because all of them will request tape. We're fixing that but it likely caused a lot of problems for people during the transition. But like I stated above, you can select multiple backups or servers and fix that problem with 1 operation.

I'm glad that some have posted that they stuck with the product and got it working now. I'm sorry to hear how much trouble it is to make the transition though. I'd like us to make that transition more smooth in the future. I'll reiterate what some others said…install in a test environment and understand how it works FIRST. Then upgrade and READ the migration report.

TIP: After upgrade, the migration report is available in the main menu (the BE Icon) to help understand what has changed. Read it again after you've upgraded to see how things mapped.

TIP: One thing upgrade/migration does NOT do for you is create groups for you that correspond to your old multi-server jobs. Turn on groups from the toolbar and create groups for your old multi-server jobs and drag those servers into the groups if that’s how you want to manage them. Then you can simply select the group and hit Edit Backups to edit the job options or stages for those backups in one operation. And by selecting the group you can see what the server status is for those and find logs and so forth.

QUESTION: Would it help the transition if we created these server groups for you during upgrade? That way you can see where your old multi-server jobs "mapped" to more easily?

[scottt709]

Thank you for your explanation. Will spend the time learning the new model paradigm. However one problem I don't understand is why you would design the software to stop all jobs on an exclude date. If I want my continue my d2d jobs and skip my tape jobs lets say for a long weekend how would I do this. Must I set my alerts to cancel when the tape prompts and alert to insert the tape. I contacted support on this and was told this is by design. Some previous users said to put it in the wish list ????

[patters]

Good point that it's only by going server-centric that you can contextualise the backup options menu (based on the target resources), and hide irrelevant and confusing stuff.

I think the most baffling thing initially is that the Groups feature defaults to being disabled. I think the first thing users of the old product should do is, enable Groups, double-click the All Servers Group, then enable list view, and compact view. Bingo. There are your Job Monitor ('Job Logs' now), and your Job Setup (just 'Jobs' now) screens that you know and love.

[GregOfBE]

This is a great point. Concerning exclude dates. In BE 2012, they are "global" and yes they originally are a "hard stop" cancelling jobs. We heard this feedback and are working on a fix to make sure it doesn't cancel jobs.

Concerning your scenario, again, great feedback. We are working to bring back per-job exclusion dates. This should help that scenario. So you'll have both global exclusion dates and per-job exclusions. Does that sound good?

[Keith_W__Hare]

I still don't understand how one is supposed to do a backup sequence to a manual load tape drive.

I need the first job to initialize the tape and the last job to unload the tape.

In BE2012, I haven't figured out how specify a sequence of jobs.

Keith

[CraigV]

...excellent explanation Greg. Should have come through at the beginning of this thread, but maybe you guys can look at doing some sort of basic steps to accomplish a lot of what's been moaned about here.

[Keith_W__Hare]

One of of the missing pieces in Backup Exec is a good explanation of the expected backup architectures.

That is, scenarios that include the environment to be backed up, the backup server, the backup & recovery requirements, and how to achieve the desired results using Backup Exec.

The BE Admin guide, blogs, white papers, & videos focus on the details of how to do bits and pieces, but do not provide anything on how the details fit into the big picture.

A couple of short documents describing the big picture would go a long way towards simplifying Backup Exec.

Keith

[Mark_McFarlane]

I am willing to give my testing another try after reading all these comments and suggestions - however, my trial period has expired...I have unintalled/reinstalled but it obviously saves the dates somewhere....how can I reset my trial period so I can test again....

[EliasA]

Mark,

You can contact Customer Care and they can assist you in extending an expired evaluation.

Couple of different ways to contact them listed here:
http://www.symantec.com/support/contact_techsupp_static.jsp

[hazmat09]

Good post,

Some things I'd like to see enhanced or fixed.

• When you create a group and try to drag and drop a non-server backup IE: a windows xp machine that has data on it that is in your backup plan. It won't allow you to move that PC into the manually created group. Even if you turn on and check "Microsoft Windows computer" filter. That XP machine will stay in the "All Servers" grouping.
• Unless I'm blind, I see no way to print the "Backup Calendar" or save it to a PDF, by day, week, month...anything.
• For the new "Exclude Date" feature, Please enhance to Exclude Date, Exclude Individual Job for that date. Allow multiple multiple user selections for that date
• Clarificaton: If you create a group and put 10 servers in that group, then do a select all. You have the option of "Run Next Backup Now" Does that run the "next" scheduled backup for all those selected servers? I ask because I I drill down for that server, I have a Full job, Diff and the duplicate to tape for those two jobs that are linked and processed immediately after those Full/Diff to DEDUP jobs.
• Enhance the "Run Backup Now" and bring back the option to schedule it later in the day etc. There may be a situation, where you need to run those at night and not have to muck about with your scheduling.
• In the Storage section you are able to see the backup sets on tape, but there is no context menu option to restore when you are viewing those contents. This should be an easy and welcome enhancement, especially for people who solely use tape and media sets.
• Regarding your question about migration. I think it would have been useful to have the upgrade process create a folder with the same job names in 2010R3 and then when the migration updates the job to individual server jobs, place those in that Server group. I found with my migration I had about 40 oddly named jobs and it was frankly a dogs breakfast. I ended up redoing about 95 percent of the jobs.

Other than those issues "So Far" my install is working fine....but one "large caveat" it is doing fine do to my due diligence and persistence in fixing all the glitches the upgrade caused.

[scottt709]

Thank you for listening and responding. Fixing the global exclude date would be great. I have enabled groups and getting my head wrapped how to backup multiple servers in one shot..