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Impressions of BackupExec 2012

Bulbous
Level 5
Partner

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?

417 REPLIES 417

ianSinclair
Level 3

Well I hope you address this area of weakness v soon, could you not also adress the issue of the make the first job overwrite then make the rest append, it goes against your server groups options, if you select a group of servers and then backtthe all up they all have the same job properties so as I understand they would all be overwrite jobs.

 

In some situations I think you have made it much more complex to get the result I need, with goood old 2010 and selections and policies it was simple.

 

I do not see complexity as progress

 

Ian

ianSinclair
Level 3

I think the issue here is that before us customers had the choice, we could back up server by server or we could group this with a selection list, we could point at a library or a dirve, we could partition or not.

 

What you have done in 2012 is remove alot of that choice, i used policies, where have they gone ?

I had the choice to backup one server in one job or lots of servers in one job, i no longer have that choice, removing that choice from me the customer who has specific needs only really leaves me one choice.

Do it your way or not at all.

 

My contract runs out on  31st dec, I will seriously consider my choices then, and unless you give me back my choices, then i will look for someone who will.

If I was you I would be concerned, this forum is a v small section of your user base, ok one or 2 might seem happy for the new product, which i would best describe as small company no tape, alot of people on here are not happy, we are system engineers who want the choices we used to have to do backups they way we want to.

 

If enough of us choose you could end up being just plain ol Greg.

GregOfBE
Level 4
Employee

We are working on improvements to more conveniently allow someone to create a sequence of backups on multiple servers to the same tape.

GregOfBE
Level 4
Employee

Transitioning to the new model is clearly painful. And yes, we are already working on ways to make it map over more smoothly. New customers who are approaching the product with a "fresh" perspective are telling us very positive things. Existing customers - especially those backing up multiple servers to tape - find the upgrade difficult depending on how they were doing it and that is understandable. We know tape is not dead - but as I posted earlier - we had reasons for modernizing the product and giving disk and cloud first class treatment in the context of our product. Regardless, we are listening.

TTT
Level 4

I agree- with barcodes, we only inventory/catalog if we insert a "foreign" tape into our library- one that BE doesn't already know about (in the C:\program files\symantec\backup exec\catalog directory). It's also important to write-protect the previously-unseen media (so any running BE job in the library doesn't grab it as a scratch tape).

TTT
Level 4

I also dupe from disk to tape, it'd be great (like I think was proposed above) if we could select a group of future-created backup sets (e.g. scheduled but not completed yet) to do a single duplicate job (single load/seek/write/rewind/verify/eject), after all the B2D ops finished.  I'm not sure where it would fit into the workflow design though- maybe it would just reside on the "backup" button.  Pre-2012 there was a job "THere used to be a job option, "New Job to duplicate (existing) backup sets"- but it was a one-time-only job, it wouldn't reset itself for subsequent job runs.

You mentioned the CLI to me before- would there be a way to tell the CLI to run such a job (search job histories, then select the resultant sets, and dupe them to tape as one continuous stream)?

TTT
Level 4

Mods: I'm reposting this because I am discussing a feature that would solve the problem of the multiple tape load/unload sequences with Backup Exec 2012:

I also dupe from disk to tape, it'd be great (like I think was proposed above) if we could select a group of future-created backup sets (e.g. scheduled but not completed yet) to do a single duplicate job (single load/seek/write/rewind/verify/eject), after all the B2D ops finished. I'm not sure where it would fit into the workflow design though- maybe it would just reside on the "backup" button. Pre-2012 there was a job "THere used to be a job option, "New Job to duplicate (existing) backup sets"- but it was a one-time-only job, it wouldn't reset itself for subsequent job runs. (I've been made aware this still exists in 2012 but it does not solve the situation that BE 2012 presents.)

You mentioned the CLI to me before- would there be a way to tell the CLI to run such a job (search job histories, then select the resultant sets, and dupe them to tape as one continuous stream)?  That way it could be scheduled using the Windows Task Scheduler, effectively creating a solution to the missing GUI option.

hazmat09
Level 4

That's great, I had no idea about this....learn something new everyday. I'll do this next tape swap out.

Thanks for the tip!

hazmat09
Level 4

 

That's great, I had no idea about this....learn something new everyday. I'll do this next tape swap out.

Thanks for the tip!

 

robnicholson
Level 6

Tape backup is not dead

I don't think anyone said tape was dead and I think I said something like "backup to disk is the future" but "tape can't be removed yet". But it feels like it's approaching it's twilight years and all the innovation in this area doesn't look to be tape centric to me - but if you rewound 10 years, tape really was the only option.

Cloud/2nd-site backup isn't an option for just rural & remote areas in the UK. You don't have to travel very far from city centres in the UK to find "too far from the exchange" is a common problem and even when you do have a good link, the upload speed is way slower than download speed for the backup, it's the upload speed that's critical.

But for cost concious small buisinesses, the solution over here usually isn't tape. It's a backup to an external disk drive. Sure, they don't do it often enough but at least they have some form of backup. Or worse, no backup at all.

What I don't know about all those stats about companies going under after a disaster is whether they had any backup at all or did they have a backup but it was a month old. Is that age of backup still going to contribute to them going out of business.

As all backup experts will probably agree, your backup is only a small part of the entire process and too many small businesses (and inviduals most likely) think that a tape backup will solve all their problems. It's better than nothing but things can still go wrong and I'd hate to be in the position of telling a small business man that his backups are worthless because the tape drive went out of alignment a few months ago, melted in the fire, and the replacement drive can't read it.

If a small business asked me right now what to put in backup wise, I'd probably say "Backup to cloud assuming your internet connection is half-decent" for two reasons: it's a) automatic and b) easy to get back. And out of these two it's (a) that is most critical. How many stories have we all heard of somebody who had bought an external disk but never got around to backing it up or testing the restore. Unless you are fortunate enough to have dedicated IT staff who's job it is to run backup, it just gets overlooked in the madness of running a business. So if you don't have dedicated staff, tape is not attractive at all.

And I would imagine most of those rural & remote companies you mention are small businesses because if they weren't small, they should be able to justify the huge expense of getting a better solution.

Cheers, Rob.

PS. Archive is a very different requirement and one for while tape still does offer a good choice except that risk of not having the hardware to read it anymore and/or going out of alignment.

ianSinclair
Level 3

Thankyou for this, when is ready let me know and I will re install, until I here such news I will remain firmly on 2010, its doing exactly what I want it to do exactly how i want it to do it.

When 2012 can do this we will re consider the upgrade

 

Ian

ianSinclair
Level 3

I am in the Uk and would be will to come along to any UK event

 

Ian

TomW_BE
Level 2
Employee

I am engineer on the BE team and I would like to respond to a couple of your items.  First regarding the inability to drag and drop the Windows XP machine into a group.  There should be nothing preventing dragging and dropping any server into a group.  Any server can be placed in any group.  Servers can also be members of multiple groups.  From your comment it is my impression that you are expecting the server to be removed from the "All Servers" group.  This is not the case.  The "All Servers" group will always show all servers regardless if they are members of other groups.  If the drag and drop is not working, you can right click on the group and click Edit or click Edit from the Groups menu in the ribbon and you will be presented with a dialog that lets you add or remove servers.  I will investigate dragging and dropping to see if there are any issues.

The "Run Next Backup Now" button will run the next scheduled backup for all servers that are currently selected.  You will be prompted with a Yes/No/Yes to All message that lets you control which servers actually have the jobs run.

paulip
Not applicable

1) Telling me to watch videos to understand why your new product doesnt suck is pointless since your product used to be intuitive and didnt need videos...even for the new user.

2)Telling me that you knew lots of users would not like your product, yet you listened to the other users doesnt show a lot of wisdom either.   Im sure there were focus groups which liked MS Vista.

3)And for the record....getting away from a job centric focus into a server centric is moronic....um...why?   because most of your users LIKE the job centric focus....which is why we've all used back-up exec for so long.

this change was dumb dumb dumb and more dumb.

 

-paul

ravishankarappa
Level 4

Very confusing front end. Really really bad.

Symantec_Lost_A
Not applicable

Well if I was undecided about whether or not to continue using Symantec BE this latest upgrade has sealed the deal. Good Bye Back Up Exec.

I absolutly hate it. I have spent the last 5 years using BE and performing upgrades and being impressed with the additional features but the retention of the over all foundation/layout of the product. We performed an upgrade this weekend during a scheduled maintence window and ran into one problem after another. None of our 6 media servers consistently updated, most of the saved jobs were lost, and now creating a new job is harder than ever. The error messages step you through 1 issue after another, as you resolve the request it is making, it creates another error. I am done and can't wait to uninstall it.

This has done nothing but create a new level of frustration. Good job Symantec! Good job!! My only other option is to call technical support and wait 3 hours for a technician that I can't understand to call me back and frustrate me even more because they do not speak clear english.

MarcusG
Not applicable

Interface can be navigated, but no one at our shop wants to spend the time to get up to speed. Have used BackupExec and Netbackup for a dozen years, but I have not realized any benefit to the new interface, and will re-install 2010 R3 just to save time and effort. My requirements were to upgrade for better features and support, not to learn a new product from the ground up and re-interpret misleading status and alerts.

Even less happy with support since the change.

 

BE_KirkFreiheit
Level 4
Employee

Thanks pkh; that's an interesting use case for "Edit next run".

Here's an idea for a workaround: perhaps your precommand script can be changed to use something as a signal to skip the import operation (the existence of an empty file, a registry key...anything that makes sense for your environment).  If the script detects the signal, it could clear it -- and skip the import.

Thanks again for the feedback, and please keep it coming.

-Kirk out.

 

 

BE_KirkFreiheit
Level 4
Employee

I'm an engineer on the BE 2012 team, and if you have any patience left at this point, I'd like to offer help to solve the specific issues you're experiencing.

I see that most of your saved jobs were lost, and the creating jobs is 'harder than ever'.  I'm curious to know where job creation has caused the most difficulty.  The face of the product has changed quite a bit, but the options are basically all still there.

Multi-server job editing is also possible: if you select multiple servers, then click the Backup button(s), you can create and edit job options for multiple servers at once.  If you back up most of your servers in a similar way, it may not be too difficult to get things running smoothly again.

If you're using tape and have strong needs to control the order of resources written to the same tape, that's a common theme we're seeing with the new release, and we're working on a solution to that as I type.

Again, if you have any patience left, engineers like me are here monitoring the forum to help.

 

 

GregOfBE
Level 4
Employee

Sorry to hear that its a "tough sell". When we did studies with existing users, they usually were initially surprised but it normally wouldn't take long before they "got it" and were off to the races.  

Backup Exec does have a long history - I know because I've been with the product for a very long time. As a result of that, we have built a lot of customers who have grown with it. It was a risk to take a well established product and change it. But as I posted previously, there were many reasons for doing so.

If you want to post specific issues, I'd be happy to try to help out.