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?

[David_Willoughb]

All the supposed efforts they are making now to fix the issues don't change the fact that they released this steaming pile to begin with. Are we supposed to just grin and bear it until they get their act together?

In my case, the latest "upgrade" to Backup Exec is more the straw that broke the camel's back rather than 1 big misstep on their part. I've been having issues with Symantec in general for years.

1) There are issues in Backup Exec that have existed for many versions that never get fixed.

2) Their licensing portal is a joke. It is far too tedious to get information there.

3) Support leaves a LOT to be desired. I'm tired of getting someone every single time who can't speak English. I'm also tired of always having my tickets assigned to someone who doesn't even work close to the same hours I do.

I could go on but I think you see the point.

I agree with one of the other posters on here. Some competing company could probably make a fortune offering to buy out existing Symantec maintenance contracts as a competitive upgrade. I for one would certainly consider it.

[CRM250]

I agree with David's post.

I too agree that some versions of BE have not been fixed and just replaced which IMO is just not right. i still have clients out there with 12.5 and because they purchased it are left without fix's to certain issues. 

Granted if they had taken out support they could have upgraded to a less flawed version (like version 9 perhaps) but they didnt and often in a SBS enviroment they wont.

I also totaly agree the licensing portal is terrible. i have an enterprise vault to upgrade from V8 to current i have been putting off because i dont have half a day spare to play battle of the wills with symantec support to get my keys. 

Same with the support hours, however being in the UK i guess we are a minority now. 

I am still looking at alternatives and will not be forced down the route symantec assumes all customers should be working. The time i and others have wasted on this for what is essentially a seriously flawed product and in my opinion again, not fit for purpose is just disgusting. 

Symantec - in the windows world this is an epic fail even bigger than Microsoft and the release of Windows ME.

[Dave_OKeefe]

Wahoo. SP1a has fixed a couple of 'nice to have features'. I'm soo happy.

Now how about the fix the core product so that I can inventory my tape drives, clear alerts without having to restart or even give me errors that aren't "Unknown reason {0}" so could have something to search on.

Now I can't even cancel jobs since SP1a went in to fix the services hanging problem.

Have just contacted my reseller about changing to another supplier. At the very least we are going back to 2010 R3.

[Biker_Dude]

Today, with BE2012, I submitted a weekly backup to start at 11:57 PM and modified the the calendar to exclude tomorrow (the 19th).  I advanced the server's clock to 11:55 PM and waited.  The job eventually start and data began writing data to tape.  The job continued to chug along past midnight and completed successfully.  I successfully ran the same test in next release of the product as well.

If this is still a problem in your environment, either provide all the steps taken to create the job and detail any settings you've may have modified from the defaults...or please contact Technical Support to begin troubleshooting the problem.

Thank you

[Biker_Dude]

I am glad SP1a has worked out for you.

There are plenty of reasons why an Inventory won't work.  Please be specific about why Inventory is not working for you.

What do you have to restart in order to clear alerts?  Please elaborate on the steps you take in order to clear alerts and what needs to be restarted.

When are you getting the "Unknown reason {0}" error?  During a backup, restore, utility job?  Please be specific when this occurs.

Thank you.

[LukeFileWalker]

I feel your pain, I too have suffered many of the issues you have all outlined here

I also had that WTF moment when I first set eyes on BE 2012, especially after thinking well 2012 has got to be better than 2010 R3, I mean it couldn't be worse, could it??? So I went ahead and upgraded...

Well after a number of months which have included, deleting all my jobs that were "upgraded" from 2010 R3 and starting from scratch, to having my servers and jobs disappear at random from the BE 2012 ui, and so on... I have learned to live with it to a degree.

For those of you that want to set the order in which your resources are backed up, have a look at the below link, this also works with standard file backups   

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH190656

[Bradl3y]

Thanks for posting the technote - I'd found this by trial and error.

The note says "If later edits are needed to the order then it is easier to remove all the existing selections and select again from a blank set of selections.", but it doesn't make it clear that you can change the order of a selection list for existing jobs - if you deselect a VM and then reselect it, it is moved to the bottom of the list. 

I do this for VMs that fail regularly, because the VM job will stop completely and won't process the rest of the list if the error is bad enough - so the VMs that back up more reliably are backed up first.

The VM jobs should have a "continue on to the next VM if a failure occurs" option.

[Dave_OKeefe]

BE 2012 was working ok until the services started hanging. SP1a was released to fix this.

Clearing alerts.. I click on the relative icon on the Backup and Restore screen. This works for the 1st and sometimes second alert after that it hangs and eventually errors with "Unknown reason {0}" error, a timeout or asks me if I want to disconnect. The only way to get back into the CAS screen is to reboot. Previously refered to as restart.

I have been unable to do a manual backup since I installed SP1a. If I do try the job just sits there either snapshot processing or queued. I cannot cancel the job and to get rid of it I need to reboot. I have not attempted to restore

[BradleySCFO]

Yea Jimmy,

SP1 fixed something and broke others.. SP1a was released to fix those things and broke still more things.  This product is quickly becoming a nightmare for me.  I've spent the last 3 months of weekends at home babying our servers in fear that our backups would fail.. and they do.. constantly.

[LukeFileWalker]

Another thing I've used to sequence my jobs is the Priority.

So if I have 10 jobs to run every night to run to the same tape drive and I don't want to go working out the times for each job to start but I want them to run in some sort of sequence, I just block them off into sets and run them like this;

3 jobs at 19:00 with a priority of Highest (I know these jobs will need approx 3 hours to run)

3 jobs at 19:10 with a priority of High

2 jobs at 19:20 with a priority of Medium

and

2 jobs at 19:30 with a priority of Low

this way all the jobs will be running by 19:30 so I have no dead time in my backup window and the priority of the job will dictate which job will get the tape drive next.

Bradl3y - Re your VM's failing, If it's the same VM's failing all the time I would split the VM backups and use the job priority to manage the order they are backed up. So at least have 2 jobs one with a priority of highest for the good VM's and one with a priority of High or Medium for the bad ones. That way you will have a stable backup of the good VM's and if the 2nd job works that's a bonus.

[BradleySCFO]

All of our VMs run in different jobs.. period.. have since i first started having issues with 2010 R3.  

[David_Palmersto]

Luke -

I don't know if maybe we should take this thread on its own, but..

In prior lives of BE, when using priorities, they would only come into effect if multiple jobs started on EXACTLY the same time (which I found problematic anyway since seconds pass very quickly).

With your description of your sets of 3 jobs scheduled 10 minutes apart, have you been seeing that the jobs scheduled later (let's say the 2 at 19:30) actually wait until all of the Highest, High, and Medium jobs start first in 2012?  I'd certainly like this.

If you are convinced that this is working for you with 2012, I'll add it back into our bag of tricks, otherwise I'll put it on our list to check for functionality.

Thanks,

[zoobadger]

I upgraded to BE2012 because my BE2010 server was stuck in a "paused" state and the solution, based on user feedback, was a clean install with a new database (then import and catalog existing media).  So it seemed like a good time to install BE2012 since I had a license under my support contract.

For all the reasons cited here I was disappointed and frustrated.  But the bottom line is that it just wouldn't work properly.  The throughput on B2D jobs was poor, it wouldn't function at all with my Superloader 3 (LTO4), and that's to say nothing of the fact that it tripled the number of daily backup jobs and added a mountain of complexity to what was previously fairly simple.

So, since it was a clean install with an empty database, I was able to fall back to BE2010 easily enough.  Wow.  After a week and a half wrestling with BE2012 it was a delight to have the old system back. 

And the really puzzling thing is that there's no reason you can't create a totally server centric backup model in BE2010.  So the one major change in 2012 isn't even a new feature.  In fact, most of my daily backup jobs ARE single server, but I do need the option of combining servers in some instances.

And, notably, BE2010 works perfectly with my Superloader.  Go figure.  I would also note that it's probably a good idea with BE2010 perform a clean install periodically.  A lot of nagging issues magically disappeared when I brought up the clean database.  Importing and cataloging the existing backup jobs was a nuisance, but I immediately ran a one-off full backup of everything, and then created daily jobs which somewhat obviated my need for the historical backup sets.

[LukeFileWalker]

Instead of doing a clean install you can use

BEUtility.exe

which is in the BE install directory, e.g "C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec\" and use that to resolve any database/view issues in BE 2012

[zoobadger]

BEutility revealed the fact that the server was stuck on pause, but doesn't include any mechanism to rectify the problem. Had I simply done a clean install right away, instead of wasting several days trying to un-pause the server, I'd have been back up and running within a day or so.  So that's my point: in an SMB environment like mine, a clean install really isn't all that disruptive.  Especially since my BE system is primarily intended for DR rather than archiving.

And while the server was stuck on pause I was unable to run reliable backups creating a risk of data loss.  Getting back up and running quickly, and restoring my backup routine was the imperative and it was a mistake not to do a clean install promptly.

[LukeFileWalker]

Hi David

Priority does work for me even when all the jobs are running and waiting for the tape drive they wait their turn based on the priority I've assigned. Meaning that jobs with the Highest priority get the drive first, then High, then Medium and so on down to Lowest priority.

You just need to ensure that you

1. set the “Keep the job scheduled for xxx hours before it is rescheduled” (on the schedule settings of the job or job defaults) to something long enough so the job doesn’t get cancelled and rescheduled automatically

2. ensure your Media Set overwrite and append timeframes, and your media options on the backup job/job defaults are sufficient to ensure the later jobs actually append to the tape and don’t overwrite the data earlier jobs have created.

I’ve run it this way for a number of months without a single glitch

From my setup it seems to actually set the jobs to run in order based on the order you change the priority...so for example if I have say Job01, Job02, Job03 and Job04 all with an original priority of medium and I then set Job04 to Higest, then set Job02 to Higest, then set Job01 to Highest and set Job003 to Highest it will runs the jobs in a sequence of Job04, Job02, Job01 and then Job03.

The below is from the BE 2012 Help file

Changing the priority for a scheduled job
The priority determines the order that jobs run. If two jobs are scheduled to run at the same time, the priority you set determines which job runs first. The priority is changed for all occurrences of the scheduled job.

The priority of the job is displayed in the Priority column in the Jobs list.

To change the priority for a scheduled job

On the Backup and Restore tab or the Storage tab, double-click the server or the storage device where the job is scheduled to run.

In the left pane, click Jobs.

Right-click the scheduled job, and then click Change Priority.

Select the new priority.
 

[hazmat09]

Going on two months and still show stopping issues. 

This says it all, name of my backup job "Critical VM's" Backup Exec treats it as this:

BEDBG - Incorrect function, Backup Exec Job Engine failed....followed by Backup Exec has exceeded too many dumps....I'm not even going to go there.

Had a demo last week of Appasure and was quite impressed. I'm strongly thinking of going that route after maintenance expires.

I've wasted far too much time on this over the last two months.

[jerrys79]

Some earlier comments from Bulbous and PCTeamAdmin who both went to Symantec last week said that Symantec will make many new changes and to stick with the product.  I'm in a situation where my maintenance ends next month so I have to decide soon. If I pass up on renewing maintenance and later decide to keep the product, I will have to pay thousands to essentially purchase it again.  If I renew and it continues to suck, I will continue wasting hours trying to get successful backups and get crap from upper management.

Of course the other side is that trying to find a new product, learning it, testing it, verifying backup/restores, getting pricing, updating documentation, etc, etc, etc.. will take an insane amount of time. Whatever I change to we will be stuck with so I also can't take changing vendors lightly either. This is the only product I follow so other products could be plagued with worse issues that i'm not aware of.  Backups are too critical which makes this decision so hard.

I did read the Gartner report released on June 11: The Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery Software. It shows Symantec, CommVault, EMC and IBM as leaders.

For now, i'm going to take a look briefly at some of these other vendors but don't have the time to fully trial/test them which is the main reason I won't jump ship yet.

Anyone have an idea of when Symantec is releasing the next beta?  I doubt anyone can answer this but Symantec employees please feel free to chime in. I'm interested to see how fast Symantec can essentially rewrite this garbage and if it will truly be any better.

Also, anyone know if there will be an update to BE 2010 R3 that will allow the agent to run/backup Windows Server 2012 RTM when it's released? Probably too early to be asking this but like I said my maintenance is coming up.  If the answer is yes, that would make my decision a lot easier. This is also probably a question for Symantec employees.

Thanks.

[Joshua_Kane]

Hazmat:

I will be reaching out to you about this issue, and helping to drive it to a conclusion.

Thanks,

Joshua

[Larry_Fine]

re: Anyone have an idea of when Symantec is releasing the next beta?

I think it is soon

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/new-beta-program-backup-exec-2012-r2