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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

Jimmy_Mac
Level 3

The one item I do have to agree with "The Future Will Be Brighter Soon"

Indeed! Because our experiences with Backup Exec 2012 has taught us all a very important lesson. Consider alternative products. ( I hate that as I have been using BE since 1998 )

After the time and frustration wasted on 2012, downgrading to 2010 r2, dealing with the telephone support (or lack therein) obtaining downgrade licenses, uninstalling remote agents, scrubbing remote agents that wouldn't uninstall properly, multiple reboots of servers, installing 2010 r2, pushing out the agents again, realizing that the service pack level was too low and the backups were running at a third of the speed we had been accustom to, more updates, more patches, more reboots, recreating (easily fortunately as I now have an intuitive tool to do so) my single backup job which creates nightly full backups of all of our critical servers, services and data and stores it to one LTO tape device, I can finally rest and now take my time evaluating competitive products.

We are going to be testing Acronis, ArcServ, Retrospect, ComVault, Maybe BEWS 2102 R2 or 2014 assuming Symantec can recover from the backlash of 2012, and just about any other product that offers what we had with BEWS v12.5.

Assuming that we can find that product, we may finally be rid of Symantec at this shop.

 

Symantec, do yourself a favor; Recall BEWS 2012 and cease sales until you have a product ready for prime time.

 

 

TTT
Level 4

It was very interesting to learn that the Backup Exec team is made up of the same people that wrote all the previous versions!  It's not like the old developers left and new developers came on- it's the same team as it's always been.  It's great that they were trying to provide solutions for the issues raised on this message forum (and other forums on the 'net too).

Your point is excellent- who were those beta testers?  Why didn't they point out all the issues that we're having?  What were their environments and requirements like?  I think things would've been different if we were all in on that beta test.  That's why I told them to sign me up for all beta releases and usability sessions going forward- we should all do that- truthfully it's how we'll get what we need for each of our own situations.

Here's the beta link again:  https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/new-beta-program-backup-exec-2012-r2

TTT
Level 4

I'd be upset with the way your support case was handled too.  Seems like the escalation didn't occur as it should've.  When a production server is down, that should be their highest priority call; someone didn't log it as such.  Have you seen Symantec's "Support Handbook" and "Global Escalation Process Guide" found here?  http://www.symantec.com/support/support_policies.jsp  There are specific ways to reach someone if tech support isn't helping (or is taking too long to respond).

TTT
Level 4

Hopefully we'd all be giving 15 minute "success stories" instead of our "list of issues" at that point :)

joearens
Not applicable

I sure wish that I my test server had been to upgrade to BackupExec 2012 first before installing on our production machine. The new user interface is a tremendous step backward compared to previous interface in BackupExec 11. First of all, you can't find anything. I've spent hours clicking around trying to find some of the most simple things. I wish Symantec would have a downgrade option. I'd go that route in a heartbeat. Watch out if you have to call for support as the technicians may or may not be able to speak English very well. Interestingly, Symantec accepts US dollars but provides foreign support.

 

IT_Chap
Level 3

". Watch out if you have to call for support as the technicians may or may not be able to speak English very well. Interestingly, Symantec accepts US dollars but provides foreign support"

 

Eerr....

This may come as a shock to you in the US, but ALL of us outside pay the same rates or more, and always get Indian support.    I have always found them to be very knowledgable and helpful, but their undestandability level fluctuates a lot, and sometimes I just cannot work out what they are saying.  But this is a whole other topic and I do not wish to detract from the important issue of hoping BE returns to a level of usability soon before we all jump ship to other backup solutions.

mpare
Level 4

Wow - I wish I found this thread before I upgraded from 2010.  I've had so many problems with 2010 and have had several issues open w/ Symantec - the end result from Symantec on these issues: "We're not fixing your problem.  Please upgrade to 2012, the issue is fixed in the new version".  So, I was "forced" to upgrade.  So far - the new version has caused more problems than it has fixed.

First of all - yep I was aware of the UI overhaul ahead of time.  I did not have a test server/test equipment available to familiarize myself with it though.  I'm not gonna bash Symantec for this... although there are many things I detest about it.  It is Symantec's product, and it is in their right to redesign the UI, job flow, paradigm, or whatever term you want to apply.  If it sucks - then we the consumer speak up by taking our dollars somewhere else (which I would do if I wasn't ball and chained to my parent' company's corp. agreement w/ Symantec).

Fortunately, the upgrade itself went smoothly and successfully, and my backup jobs were running OK - but things quickly went downhill over the weekend when I noticed that ALMOST EVERY tape my backups were using was being marked "End marker unreadable".  All of my tape drives were just cleaned.  Even brand new tapes were being marked "End marker unreadable".  Of course, this resulted in my jobs requesting overwritable media - since the "End marker unreadable" tapes were unappendable.  So, I was only able to get about half of my weekend full backups completed.  I'm applying SP 1a now.  I doubt this will resolve the issue, but it is always best to be fully patched first - then I'll submit ANOTHER issue with Symantec.  I will probably end up having to go back to 2010 (thank goodness I saved a backup).

As I'm familiarizing myself with the new interface, it's not THAT bad.  I, like many admins, am a bit hesitant to change, especially with such a critical piece of software.  It just seems like they've dumbed it down.  I've been with BE since version 8 or so.  It seems like since version 12, BE has been taking a downturn in terms of reliability - with very little progress in terms of innovation (I forget what version they introduced policies in, but that was AWESOME).  It seemed that each new version basically would add support for whatever the new OS version was at the time.  But, I digress.

All this aside, I think these are my legitimate complaints:

  • No running job view.  I can't find a view that shows all currently running/active jobs.  From what I see, you have to go to find each individual running job either by going to the tape or disk device itself.  And, this doesn't always match up - there have been instances where there was a job running but no indication of it whatsoever at the media device (see below)
  • No more policies!  Why would they do away with this!?  This was one of the BEST things they added several versions back.  I have over 30 VMs.  Before, it was so SIMPLE to add a new VM by just adding it to a policy.  I also had several other servers/server types that I grouped together.  Now, I have to manage jobs for each individual server.  I could only imagin the headache this causes for admins managing 100+ servers.  Are they trying to get us to look at NetBackup?  This is the most retarded decising they made - getting rid of policies.
  • It seems you're no longer able to determine which media is being used by an currently running job.  In the past I was able to do this, and it helped during troubleshooting problems with media sets.  In fact, you can't even view the log of an actively running job.
  • Ive had a few cases where the server has a status of "Backing Up" and the little progress indicator is displayed - but when viewing the job list under the server details - there is no backup taking place.  What is going on??
  • Can't alter the job priority??  When submitting a job to Run Now - you can't alter the priority.  This would be useful if there were currently running jobs, but I needed to submit a job right away to run ahead of jobs that are in the queue.  Instead, you have to submit the job - cancel it (because you can't change the job priority of a running job), THEN you can change the priority and re-submit.  Just stupid.  I ended up having to put all the jobs waiting in queue On Hold, then submit a bunch of jobs I wanted to run at a higher priority.
  • Tape used capacity is not always accurate.  I saw a tape in one of my media sets displayed as being empty.  When I looked at the backup sets on the tape, there was a single set sized around 3TB.  Obviously, the backup set had spanned from another tape that filled up.  But, I had no idea how much capacity was left on the tape.  Which brings up another issue:
  • You can't vew the series of tapes used by a backup set that spans multiple tapes.
  • You can't specify a target directory for Disk-based media.  You're forced to specify a drive.  (I kinda see the reasoning here though, I assume BE doesn't want multiple disk media sets on a single drive letter/array, assuming for performance reasons.  But: they do let you manipulate the number of active jobs to a disk media set - so that sort of defeats the purpose.  So, what if I wanted 2 disk media sets on 1 array each with different retention policies.  Nope, can't do it anymore.)

I might be able to live with these deficiencies (as long as I get reliable backups, that is paramount), but the "End Marker Unreadable" issue is killing me. 

I hope Symantec hears these complaints, but my patience has been dwindling over the last few years, and this new version isn't helping matters. 

patters
Level 4

The End Marker Unreadable issue is some kind of fault with BE 2012's handling of hardware encryption. As a workaround you can configure your backup jobs to use software encryption until you have started a support case and requested the "orphan fix" (pre-release of the fix which hasn't yet been QA'd). It fixed the problem for me, so it's likely to be released via LiveUpdate soon. Here's the official tech note for that issue:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH191134

 

I recently carried out a full diasaster recovery test on BE 2012 and discovered the following things - so be warned:

  • AVVI restores took one order of magnitude more time to restore than they did to backup. So restore rates of 400MB/min - simply awful. I had to queue them up overnight and I only had restored systems running on day 2 of the test. If any of you have some stats on this please share. Our DR partner company was using a fibrechannel twin drive LTO4 tape library and the VMware hosts had dedicated NetApp SAN storage using 2 teamed gigabit NICs exclusively for iSCSI. Media server had 2 teamed 1Gb/s adapters, same for the hypervisor management connections. I have previously done restores from LTO4 there running at around 4000MB/min.
  • The time estimates for some restores are very inaccurate, very noticably so for Exchange Mailbox restores. The estimate seems to suggest that it will restore the entire Information Store just for a single mailbox, but of course it doesn't. It completes quickly.
  • On servers protected by the Remote Agent, if they have any DFS shares your backup job must include not only the whole C: drive (as documented), but the entire drive containing the DFS shares or SDR will not be enabled. Even deselecting a folder which is clearly not in the DFS selections is not permitted. This isn't logical, since BE can clearly explore which folders form the DFS selections (they're listed in the Shadow Copy Information!). On huge file servers, often you do want to exclude parts of the filesystem.
  • During an SDR restore, the restored system runs Sysprep when it reboots and goes through a hardware detection phase. This seemed acceptably fast on Windows 2003, but took hours for a 2008 R2 system. Surely it would be logical to make that step optional. I mean sometimes you're restoring onto hardware which you *know* is identical. In my case, some of them were VMware VMs so they are exactly the same. It means that you have to spend quite a while reconfiguring all your NICs after the restore (very annoying when you have webservers with multiple IP bindings).
  • I am running the orphan fix to correct the End Marker Unreadable issue, but I now discover that I am unable to catalog any tapes that were not created by BE2012. That's a pretty absurd way to enhance your product. What can I do with the archived tapes which I may need to restore from?

mpare
Level 4

OMG Thank you for your reply!

I didn't even think of hardware encryption causing the problem.  How terrible.  I should have known - there were issues with hardware encryption + Archiving option (one of the reasons we were forced to upgrade since they were not going to fix it in 2010). 

We MUST use encryption (preferably hardware) due to the sensitivity of our data.  I've used software in the past but it slows our backups down quite a bit (for obvious reasons).  At least I can justify turning off encryption entirely for any data sets being stored on internal tape media only (tapes that don't leave our data center) - and I can document/justify this in our issue.  (of course, that means editing about 50 individual jobs instead of a couple policies, just plain stupid!!!)

However, this issue combined with the inability to catalog tapes created by previous versions of BE - will likely force me back to 2010.  If I can't catalog and restore from old tapes - the show's over. 

While I can work with and accept the UI and it's "isms", I CANNOT work without key fundamental functionality such as hardware encryption, catalog capability, etc.  I can't afford sitting around waiting for a fix, either, and I also cannot afford to roll back to the older product and it's issues.  I remember "putting up" with various issues during past major releases (basically, they rushed them out the door), but this is UNACCEPTABLE!  Your warnings, my past experiences, other posts, and all these issues make me want to jump ship ASAP.

I'm currently working on obtaining a full demo from APPASSURE (I'm on the phone with them now)

mpare
Level 4

OK so AppAssure is disk-only (but tape backup is in their "roadmap"), so it might not be the best fit for us.  But, it does produce de-duped encrypted flat files that I can throw on tape using whatever.  This is not all that far off from how we backup SQL - we use Quest Litespeed to produce the files onto disk then BE sucks the files and writes to tape.  Litespeed is faster than BE, and allows for object level recovery, among many other features.  I haven't used a BE SQL agent in YEARS.

Oh if only I didn't have to worry about sending tapes offsite, or I would even use tapes anymore.  Our bandwidth needs are just too great.

Nigel_the_Nerd
Level 3

Upgrading from BE 2010 to BE 2012 is a bit like going from XP to Vista. I am backing up about 40 odd physical boxes and 50 odd VM's. Oue 2010 box was a single quad core CPU with 14 GB RAM with 14 TB external disk, and a dual LTO5 library, running 32 bit Windows 2003 R3. It ran 2010 R3 quite happily.

To get 2012 to work acceptably, we had to move to a Dual quad core CPU and 40 GB RAM, with 20 TB external disk, and the dual LTO5 Library, put Windows 2008 R2, SP1 Enterprise, on it, install BE 2012, run Live update a bunch of times ( currently on SP1a), and then reconfigure all backup jobs from scratch. we set up the external disk for DeDupe only, with 20 concurrent sessions.

Upgrading the existing box without wiping it first caused problems. Trying to run 2012 on a single CPU box was too slow. Less than 32GB of RAM was too slow. We added NIC teaming to agregate the 2 NIC's, ( on 1 GB network) as 1 GB was too slow. I went through 4 different boxes, of increasing spec until we arrived at this one. ( it was an ESX host)

Having done that, The most useful view I have found is this: when you are in the "servers" view, make sure you are in "standard" view, not compact, select "List" view, not tree, and then click on the "View All Jobs" button, and sort by "Job Activity". This will give you a dislpay of all running jobs, with throughput, data rate, status, and time running.

Also, quite by accident, when I upgraded the tape driver in Windows device manager ( just did a right click, update drives, and got the MS ones) the active job would then show under the "Jobs" option on the storage tab, like Symantec kept telling me it should. Interestingly, when I was running just the Symantec drivers, ithe current job writing to the tape was not showing up, just tape operations like inventory and catalog. I am running an IBM TS3100, in case any one else is having the same problem with the same hardware.

Having struggled with it for 4 months now, and gone trawling through the training videos, and the forums, I am getting used to the clunky interface, and have now got to the stage where it is useable. Not good, not intuitive, but at least useable.

Good luck with it!!

 

 

patters
Level 4

I'd open a case and request that orphan fix if I were you. The older tapes problem may not be universal - it may just be something in my environment (or my particular tape library). And the only way to get this fixed is to get involved. As you've noticed, rather like the banking sector, all of the main backup software companies are irritating to deal with in some way - so sadly, moving product may not be a workable outcome.

patters
Level 4

Yes like OS upgrades, BE upgrades are probably a bad idea in general. Clean installs are more advisable, otherwise the first time you raise a support case they'll blame the upgrade for the issue you report (voice of bitter experience) and you'll have to reinstall again anyway.

As you mentioned, the first thing anyone should do in BE 2012 is enable Groups in the toolbar, double click All Servers, then select List view and Compact views. Then you have the same views you would be familiar with from previous BE versions.

fowljewl
Level 3

I elected to not extend my support.  I didn't feel it was in the best interest of my company to spend thousands of dollars to help beta test a product that is supposed to be ready to perform in an enterprise environment.  I haven't been able to get one single backup in the last week.  There's alway one obscure error after another. 

jerrys79
Level 4

fowljewl, what backup software are you switching to? I'm in the same boat as you. Less than a month left on the current support contract. Still not sure what to do. Switching will also cost you a lot of money, more than a renewal, unless you can get a company to give you some type of competitive price match to switch. I also don't have the time to fully test a new product right now. Not a good situation to be in. My backups are atleast working (or so they say they are successful) on my one upgraded site. I'm just wondering if I can renew and then stretch another year on 2010 R3 on my other sites in a worst case scenario and then switch next August if things haven't changed by then.

jerrys79
Level 4

Do you get an email for each server ("job") that is backed up?  That was one of my complaints, I only have 2 servers and get 2 emails.  I can't imagine getting 40+ daily in your case.

hazmat09
Level 4

Had a demo of AppAssure a few weeks ago. Most impressive and fast!. I like their simplictic licensing model. Tape is doable now via scripting that they can set up for you. Native tape support is not far off from what I've been told. This is a must have for me, so I asked a lot of questions regarding that.

Given that we use all Dell hardware and AppAssure was aquired by Dell and Dell Gold Support is excellent IMO, this is what I"m heavily leaning towards. They have a whitepaper on their website that does a AppAssure vs Backup Exec 2010 R3

patters
Level 4

I have proposed an Idea to retain SDR functionality with partial selections on volumes containing DFS shares, provided that the DFS folders remain in the selection list.

This is not currently allowed for some reason, even though Backup Exec can enumerate which folders are DFS shared.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/ideas/sdr-option-allow-partial-selections-volumes-some-dfs-c...

Please can this be considered for BE 2012 R2?

fowljewl
Level 3

The majority of my environment is already virtual so I made the decision to switch to Veeam.  My renewal cost for BE 2012 was scheduled to be about 4000 for support.  My cost to switch to Veeam was about the same, however, my renewal cost next year is about $400.  So, my ongoing costs are much less expensive over time and best of all, Veeam works. 

mpare
Level 4

Nice, that is good to hear.  I've also had a very positive support and usage experience with Dell, from workstations to servers to a Dell/EMC SAN.  Unfortunately, our parent company had a falling out with Dell.  Anyway - back on topic - I also stressed the importance of maintaining usage of tape hardware.  We have a Dell ML6020 with LTO4 drives so once they add native tape support, I'm sure that won't be a problem. :)  I'm gonna have a demo in my hot little hands in the next week or two.  Better still, my parent company's parent company (lol) has an account with AppAssure.

It is never an easy decision, or process, to jump ship from one product to another.  But, this has just been too many times around with BackupExec....