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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

mpare
Level 4

I agree, and will support the overall process by opening a case.  But, I've ultimately made the decision to step back to 2010 in the short run.  I'm just encountering way too many bugs and problems and don't have the time to wait for more patches and fixes.  I've made notes of all the issues I'm having.  Way too many reliability issues for my comfort.  This isn't just some complaints about the UI - but rather - very fundamental reliability issues and concerns that I can't continue to have in a production environment.  This product is by no means production ready.  I hope they get it right with R2.  Sadly for Symantec, I hope to be long gone by then. 

This reminds me of Symantec Endpoint solution that was released several years back.  On paper, it looked great - but in production, it messed up so many of my servers.  Due to that fiasco, we jumped ship to McAfee.  Is it me, or does Symantec have a habit of pushing out product before it's ready?

hazmat09
Level 4

When you put out a hotfix, for the love of the almighty tech god, can you PLEASE MAKE IT SO I DON'T HAVE REBOOT EVERY SERVER THAT REQUIRES AN AGENT UPDATE!!!

Not so convenient when you have a Hyper-V HA Cluster!

hazmat09
Level 4

Updated April 29th to 2012, have been babysitting it ever since. I lost track of how many hours I've invested in getting this thing stable. They should be giving huge rebates on maintenance IMO.

DanielBickford
Level 6
Employee Certified

Hotfix TECH189761 is now available to resolve multiple issues, including "End marker unreadable"

This patch will be available July 11, 2012 via LiveUpdate.

Kingston
Level 4

I have to agree that having to reboot each server that requires an agent update to be time consuming. With the remote agents being a windows system service surely they could be programmed in such a way as to just require a system service restart?

Kingston
Level 4

We have also switched to Veeam.

We first started using Backup Exec in 2010 for our Hyper-V Cluster, but have always found it unreliable. One day it will work, and the next day it will fail without anything being changed. I spent many weekends trying to fix this without any luck. We had to constantly "baby" the software to get it to backup without failure. There were two things that made the decision to switch to different software more easy:

1. We increased the number of SQL database instances that we have, and we noticed that backup exec's application agent is licensed per database (or database instance)! We find this extremely unreasonable. The agent should be licensed per server (and correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the previous agent (called the "SQL agent") was licensed per server). This per database/instance licensing was too expensive for us.

2. BE 2012. For Hyper-V Clustering we found it no more reliable than previous versions. Not only this, the software is slow and cumbersome. I click on a tab and wait a while before the tab appears. Also, we want job-centric, not server-centric!

3. Licensing is complex. Hell it's just backup software, not an OS. "Keep it simple stupid"!

We have since switched to Veeam, and it has worked flawlessly. Not only this, but their customer support is excellent. There are no agents to install, keep updated, and to license. Licensing is very simple - you pay per host socket.

Keep in mind though that it's not a complete replacement for BE:
- it does not support tape (but this is coming)
- it can only back up VM's, not physical servers.
We are currently using a combination of Veeam and BE to write to tape, and it's working well. We may one day do away with tapes altogether and use external hard disks.

 

hazmat09
Level 4

Isn't it this? - http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=tech189571

If so, It was pushed out already today. I had this as an update available this morning.

hazmat09
Level 4

Your suggestion would be greatly welcomed! It's bad enough applying a Service Pack or Hotfix requres a reboot, but to add the hassle of rebooting all your servers with agents just adds to the annoyance.

Had to reboot with this hotfix and have to reboot our 20 plus servers that needed the agent update - http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=tech189571

Joy.....

Nigel_the_Nerd
Level 3

That is a good idea TTT, I signed up too. SInce I am pretty much stuck with using BE, I might as well help make it work!!

Nothing beats real world feedback for the developers!!

Nigel_the_Nerd
Level 3

At the moment, yes. For most of the servers I have a weekly full and a daily incremental, then each of these jobs duplicates to tape once the write to disk has completed, and I currently have email notification on, so I 2 notifications per server per day. ( Spam city, I tell you!)  Of course once I have all the issuses sorted out I can turn off the emails and just do a visual check. Or if Symantec manage to set it up so I can produce a report that will tell me the server name, job name, and if it succeeded, failed or was rescheduled, I could set that up to run at 9:00 AM every morning, and that would save me the trouble! It is an area I need to put a bit more work into, but I have been flat out just getting backups running reliably to date so I haven't got any further with it!

Nigel_the_Nerd
Level 3

Well Bugger Me!! (pardon the expression, but I am Australian, and that is the sort of thing we say here)

I have been strugling with an issue on my IBM TS3100 tape Library ( has 2x LTO5 drives in it, and 2x 12 slot magazines, SAS attached) One drive has been going offline every time I try to run some function from withing BE. (scan, inventory, write to tape, etc). I had it logged with IBM, as I figured, 2 drives the same, same firmware level, on the same SAS atachment, one works, one doesn't, looks like a hardware issue to me,  but after applying that hot fix, the baulky drive came back online, and resumed working.

Now for the next challenge!! I'm sure it will not be far away with BE2012!!

 

Nigel_the_Nerd
Level 3

OK, so I have these tapes that were created on a different server, and I need to restore a file. I am trying to catalog the tapes, but BE2012, bless it's little cotton socks, keeps trying to write backups to the tapes I am trying to catalog. Now I switched on the writes protect tabs before I put the tapes in, and I set the catalog jobs to "Highest" priority", and the write to tape jobs are at "Medium" priority, so why does it keep queueing the catalog jobs behind the write jobs? Obviously, they keep failing as there in no writable media in the library.

I thought I could just put the Write jobs on hold, but as they are linked jobs, the "Hold" option is greyed out. I don't want to put the whole job queue on hold, because I want the write to disk jobs to keep running, and I want to keep writing to tape on the other drive in the library.

Any one got any ideas? Have I missed something obvious? Did I jinx myself with my last comment?

CRM250
Level 2

Well after more time wasted with my own BE2012 i admit defeat. i am done with this. I am not wasting more time on this clearly flawed product that IMO is not fit for purpose.

The only concern i have now is all our customers are still running 2010 for now, and while working perfectly (and one was recently tried and tested in a true DR scenario) my fear is when they are forced to "upgrade" to 2012.

If Symantec are commited to commercial suicide with 2012 then fair enough, but i would like to know i can keep using 2010 until someone else fills the gap in the market with a working useable product.

On a slight tangent, anyone used DATTO ? i am, and wow what a product. someone else mentioned appasure, well DATTO uses this technology it would seem. Ok no use for taking backups to tape / disk, but for taking real snapshots of servers, and being able to play them back in real time (similar to platespin) in a DR scenario, but with the added advantage of having your images in the cloud too and not just stored localy. Its worth a look for anyone looking for a quality working DR solution for a customer / own business (and no i dont work for them or have any interest in them)

 

JuergenB
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP   

Hotfix  TECH189761 doesn´t fix anything in my installation.

BE20212 still crashes at dupliction.

OrphanFix 8.4,8.5 and 8.6 doesn´t fix anything ...

Please get the updates to your QA department before puplishing them.

JuergenB
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP   

I am glad that i was able to extend my support in May for the old agent.

After complaining about all the errors and the fact that the old agents for advanced disc based backup was combined into the enterprise agent (3x times) i got an offer from my reseller.

I still could extend my support contract for the BE2010 maintenance for the advanced disc based backup option.

So i didn´t have to pay all the unnecessary stuff in maintenance..

Nigel_the_Nerd
Level 3

I created 2 new media group2 for the tape drives, and only put one drive in each group, then went through all the backup jobs for the 90 odd servers I am backing up and changed the to write to one new group only, then I could run my catalog and restore on the other group. Not fast, not elegant but it worked.

Hey Symantec guys, why can't we put linked jobs on hold? If I only had 1 tape drive, then I would not be able to continue backiung up to disk while doing a catalog and restore on the tape drive. The way you have it set up, I'd either have to put all the jobs on hold, and get not backup to disks running, or go into all the jobs and remove the linked job function, which involves trawling through all the job logs to find out how long each job runs for so I know how long I have to wait before I can schedule the write to tape.

This is not a helpful situation!!

David_Palmersto
Level 4

Nigel -

Here is another workaround for your B2D duplicates and running catalog and restore jobs:

1) Set the duplicate jobs to normal or low priority

2) When you want to do a tape job while duplicate jobs are running, simply set the priority on that job to higher than what the duplicates are set to and run it.

3) As soon as the running duplicate job finishes on one of the tape drives, the next job that starts will be the higher priority one.

This is new behavior with BE 2012 where the priority actually has an effect AFTER a job is running.  In previous versions, the job priority only affected which job was chosen to run next (and since all jobs waiting for available media are already running, priority was rarely used previously by us)

Now, we have a number of ways to put priority jobs to use as we have the duplicate jobs occupying the background tape availability and the important jobs taking precedence when they need it. Among our commonly used higher priority jobs now are Inventories after replacing tapes, restores, catalogs, urgent out-of-backup-window backups, erasures. 

HIH.

 

Turls
Level 6

To better enable followers of this thread to move forward and follow the resolution of distinct topics or issues we've identified the key topics raised in this thread as well as in our in-person customer feedback sessions that many of you attended. We’ve created and/or identified existing threads that focus on tracking these specific topics, and have assigned product managers to each of the threads to ensure that you receive timely and relevant feedback to your comments. We invite you to subscribe to these threads and to continue your conversation in one (or more) of the following places.

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Job Monitor is Back in BE 2012!

Training and information on the new User Interface and processes in BE 2012

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Continued Support for BE 2010