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?

[IT_Chap]

I hope the upcoming R2 lives up to expectations, and actually works.  I'll hang on that long before deciding to renew the account, because as was pointed out here earlier, it is a lot of effort to switch product, and so far BExec has been making that choice easy.

I really hope we don't have any major requests for restores for anything archived over the past few months, as I have little confidence that I could comply. 

I recently went to the BE2012 Roadshow, and it could have been any product, just slip the brand name into the powerpoint at the appropriate place, and its all RA RA wonderful product, boost your RTO on the CEO by the XYZ yaddyyaya.  Wasted time, I left after 2 hours.  Not once did I hear, in a very loud voice, THIS IS NOT LIKE ANYTHING YOU'VE SEE BEFORE.  DO NOT INSTALL IT IN PRODUCTION UNTIL YOU HAVE THOROUGHLY TESTED IT'.  

They should have, as there has been 15 years of incremental changes, colours go to yellow, bits of this, bits of that, so why would the next version be different??  Pressure was on, Exchange2010 failing under BE2010, so I installed BE2012.  Nothing apart from meaningless sales blah to warn of the impending storm I and so many others sailed into.

You guys at BE must get it right this time, and skip the sales crap.

[JiJoJaJuJe]

Years ago when Symantec acquired Backup Exec (or Veritas) I predicted it would take 3 versions for Symantec to fuck it over badly.

Unfortunately I was right in this regard.

Symantec is a manager driven bunch of idiots, that rather have UIs that make managers (well some types of them) get a boner than produce something that is actually functional. This has always been the reason we preferred VERITAS!! Backup Exec over ARCServe as they are the same way.

Not a whole lot of proper alternatives unfortunately.

But you have to grant it to Symantec. Screwing over so many things and still getting business is quite amazing. In the same respects I don't get what they did with Dell ITA either (now Dell Management Console). It installs over 70 pieces of crap (just have it screw up your vcenter server and have to remove it manually - you'll see) and requires 4GB of memory - whilst most users only want to get an e-mail when something is wrong with the hardware. Basic monitoring tools used to do this with much less. And they worked (can't get it working...).

One can only think they signed deals with every hardware vendor as they can sell much more to people that run bloatware - I mean Symantec software.

/me goes evaluating other products.

[CraigV]

...language? Vent all you want, but keep it clean!

[JiJoJaJuJe]

With all due respect, this already is a seriously revamped trying to keep it social post.

If I would have said what I wanted to say....

[Bulbous]

I just got a beta invite. The actual software isn't posted yet, but should be by the end of the week. Looking forward to seeing some of the changed we specifically asked for.

Also, very much looking forward to having the Job Monitor back!

[ldunham1]

We are in 2012. New amazing technologies are just in the corner: Project Glass, “autonomous vehicles” and much more. The new concept of Backup Exec and this new interface can be considered one of those innovations.

We need to be aware about what we are dealing with before to say that the product is this or that.

Sometimes we can be judging our lack of knowledge, and covering ourselves pointing fingers to something new, just because we don’t know what we should know to be able to “control” the innovation. Human being don’t like to lose control of the environment.

We should give time to ourselves, study, ask with intention to learn, research, and in the end try to help the improvement of any new technology for our own benefit.

[Timmp]

I am glad to express my complete and utter frustration with Backup Exec 2012 on this forum.  Three days later, I am still fumbling through this completely idiotic interface to schedule backups.  This is the most counter-intuitive product Symantec has come out with.  I have worked with virtually every version of Symantec's BE and have worked through many versions of Netbackup.  Netbackup which is a little cumbersome is much better than this.  It's like Symantec wrote this backup software for complete morons that have no idea what they are doing.  I mean, I cant even specify a specific backup to disk folder.  If I select a backup to disk job, it ONLY creates a pre-defined folder on a partition...wtf is that crap?  Then, I cant go back and modify that. 

Why cant it be like a normal backup solution.  Create a backup job and add servers to it.  I find myself clicking all over the place to only find myself back at square one.  I am in the transition phase of moving from 12.5 to 2012 and am contemplating going with 12.5.  The only issue is I upgraded the guests to the new version of the agent...about the only nice thing I found that actually worked well.  Sorry for my rants but I am so aggravated that this interface is so crappy and reminds me of the early version of backup software that virtually gave you no control over what you wanted to do.

Oh yeah, I love how I add servers using the add servers "feature" and create a backup job with them but then no job exists in the "jobs" area...Frckin beautiful!

Oh yeah, and one more thing.  So I can install the agent on a Windows 2008 R2 DC, create a trust, validate my credentials and all looks good then I get some stupid error that it can't communicate with the server...even using an account in the Domain Admins group as the backup exec service...NICE!!!!!

[CliveL]

I installed BE 2012 this past week Monday. What a disaster. From having backups that complete successfully (1.2TB) every night to my backups now not completing at all. I gave it two days, and then rolled back to BE 2010. That on its own was a mission, but fortunately my backuos are back to normal.

Symantec this is THE WORST version of BE I have ever experienced and I too have been using BE since the days of Veritas. Withdraw it from the market and re-think your strategy completely!!!

[Timmp]

I was running 12.5 and went through an infrastructure upgrade in the last few months.  Thought it would be good time to upgrade Backup software and upgrade my 12.5 version of BE.  I am glad I did not purchase the licenses yet for BE 2012 as I uninstalled it and went to BE 2010.  That is just an update to 12.5 so a far more simple upgrade for me.  It was up and running with identical jobs as before in less than a few hours.  I can't express my disgust for the BE 2012 product enough.  They competely screwed up the interface in my opinion.  It is so convoluted, counterintuitive and cumbersome that I will not be moving to that version in any future timeframe.  Glad I am not alone here!

[fowljewl]

There's a reason Service Pack 1a is already out.  It seems like I really can't getting anything done without some type of error popping up.  I then run through the 8 or 9 possible causes and still can't get anything to work.  Suggestions from tech support have been to recreate all partitions, recreate all jobs, recreate deduplication.  I even went so far as to uninstall and reinstall the program but I am still running into errors everywhere.  This software is simply not stable enough for a production environment.  I'm switching to something else. 

[fowljewl]

I was in the exact same boat as you.  My renewal was coming up and I wanted to check out the new product before I decided whether or not to renew.  After working with it for almost a month, my decision was easy.  I am moving to something else.  Too many errors, too long waiting for tech support to respond to me after 5:30 when I have already left for the day.  First line of tech of tech support always says to run live update, which in my case only works some of the time.  Yearly maintenance is simply too costly for the level of tech support received.  There are much better and cheaper products out there.  I hate to give such a bad review of software but I really believe this version is simply broken, even with Service Pack 1a.

[mike_r55600]

I agree with everyone here.  I have used Backup Exec for years, I am affraid to think how long.  So when I saw the upgrade from 2010 to 2012 I thought great, a better way to store data offsite or somthing.

Well the user interface is the worst thing I have ever experienced.  And the program just doesn't work. The jobs fail, I can't append, it is just frustrating. The capacity displays for my DLT tapes never change, I can't tell how much space is left on a tape after a job, though the DAT tapes display properly. I use to backup multiple servers on the same job, forget that, and I can't figure out how to make a "COPY" job.  I run a few tape drives every night, one just to hold an off site copy.  But if I run a full backup it resets all the archive bits and my differential backups are worthless after that.

I can't screw around with this any more, I need to revert back to 2010.

Or find a better product.

[MMF]

Gentlemen, do not waste time. Symantec does not want to improve Backupexec. They have a better product, Netbackup.

Look for another solution. I recommend Arcserve.

[tchgroup]

I would now have to say this was the worst investment to renew all our license agreements and plans for 2012. I just cant believe how cumbersome and crappy the job setup is and how it operates servers first and jobs second. I mean seriously what happened. As a software engineer did Symantec not even talk to any end users about conceiting or showing the software prior to release.

I have hours upon hours into this new version now. Only to be welcomed to jobs not making the time frame, insert media, failed jobs... It operates now with 4 times the amount of management needed to have good backups than before.

Unsatisfied is an understatement.

Epoch failure on your part. and now I find myself abandoning Symantec who we have used for 10+ years.

[Kiran_Bandi]

Interface and the way of configuring is very much changed from earlier verisons of BE. People might have spent months in learning in and out. Agreed.

But for admins, who really know (not who just feel they know) and spent time on learning how BE (earlier versions) works, it is not so difficult to understand and work with the cahnges made to the interface/software. By nature we think, what we don't know is not good and never work. 

Thing to understand is no software will come out in it's first release without any negatives in it. It will take some time for any sofwtare to be stabilized. So, a humble request is to go through the software, keep visiting forums, Known Issues section, Ideas Section, provide GENUINE feedback and help Symantec improving the software. It might take some time for symantec to fix all these issues, be patient. I hope R2 would fix a lot of them.

[tchgroup]

Its backwards. I mean really who and what admin focuses the backups on just the server. For the life of me I can not understand who came up with the logic to seperate the jobs out for each server whereas now instead of one job a night you have 10 jobs a night and anyone can fial the rest. Then it causes more confusion and management time to maintain. Sure it might be "easier" to setup but the cost of that vs using is pointless.

I mean was it really that bad to look at a job and then see all the planned activity for that job?

Now you have to micro manage 10 jobs a night an hope they all complete correctly and don't go outside the windows.

The issue people are having is that it logically doesn't make sense. I am glad they place thier efforts on improvement but sometimes they should just focus on better processes and failover to ensure good backups, reliable jobs and good recovery. Instead they messed up the core functionality.

Whats the point of all these new "features" if they messed up the core that fails even before you can use these features.

I think Symantec should have posted a message. WARNING!!!! THIS SOFTWARE WILL TAKE YOU SEVERAL DAYS TO FIGURE OUT AND USE. IT WILL REQUIRE TO RE-VALIDATE WHY YOU USE SYMANTEC.  They should put that as a message box before your allowed to upgrade.

I will figure it out because I have no choice. But people should be warned.

Enought venting... to much time on this already...

[jsaliga]

You seem to be brushing aside all of the legitimate complaints and are suggesting that people just suck it up and spend their valuable time helping Symantec to fix this mess.  That's all well and good if you only have a few servers to back up and no real work to do, but not so good if you have a sizable mixed environment with a lot of virtual and physical machines you have to protect in addition to a truckload of other responsibilities.

The problem for me here is that Symantec made a gross miscalculation in deciding to redesign.  Backup Exec is not just a product...it is a BRAND.  What happened here would be very similar to Chevrolet redesigning the Corvette and making it more European like an Audi or BMW.  Chevy might be able to sell some cars that way, but everyone who was loyal to the Corvette brand would be running for the exits.  Backup Exec 2012 is Backup Exec only in name.

In my view BE 2012 is the straw that broke the camel's back.  With each successive release of Backup Exec I have found a increasingly lower degree of feature integration.  With each successive release I have had to spend more and more of my time debugging backups.  And with each release I find more and more technotes that state there are no current plans to issue a hotfix to resolve a particular problem.  GRT has been a problematic feature in most scenarios for the past few releases, and it doesn't seem to be improved in 2012.  So you end up having to put together a patchwork of bandages just to get your backups to run.  Most of these problems are well documented.

With lots of feature integration issues Symantec is putting a  huge burden on customers with IT staff resources already stretched too thin.

If there is one product that had better work reliably, it is those products in the data protection, disaster recovery, and business continuity space.  Rather than redesign I would have preferred to see Symantec spend the development resources to improve useability with the traditional UI and more tightly integrate features such as GRT.

[James_Avery]

NOT EVER!

[Bulbous]

Of course we are all fans of the single, multi-server job. Why did they split this up? Well, one of the reasons is simple - with a single job, the options you set affect ALL servers in that job. With single-server jobs, you can set the options however you like for each job.

As it stands now, you are left with having to manage a whole bunch of jobs. One of the improvements that is coming is something that is tentatively called "Job Sequencing", in which your whole bunch of jobs is treated like a single entity - more like it used to be. I personally have asked that the Job Sequence be as configurable as the single multi-server job used to be. Let's hope they call manage to code it that way!

We also did talk about some kind of warning for the installation process. There was even talk about a mandatory training video, but we didn't go that far.

I'm looking forward to installing the beta release and seeing the improvements, that we (as disgruntled customers) have suggested.

[charlesc_act]

except if you are using compression on a tape, and the previous behaviour of BE remains true (from v12.5) - that if a large database overlapped the native tape capacity it would assume the tape was full. so i used to order the database backups first and let the file storage backup hit the point between native and compressed capacity.

this may no longer be an issue, but it is one more thing that has to be tested.