Questions about creating bakup policies in BE2012.

[Leo_Young]

My company have been using BE9 for a long time.

Now we will plan to use BE2012, but It seems there are many differences in creating backup policies.

For example:

Backup a share folder on a fileserver, with BE9, I create 4 policies:

1. A fully backup 1th of every month ;

2. Differential backups for the next 2-15th days, backup data will be stored in tape groups A (same as policy 1);

3. A fully backup 16th of every month;

4. Differential backups for the next remained days of a month, backup data will be stored in tape groups B (same as policy 3).

But with BE2012, How to?

[Colin_Weaver]

The attached scerenshot shows you how to do the schedule - one important point make sure both fulls and the differential start at the same time of day as then a hidden conflict rule will apply if the diff and the full appear to be set for the same day where the full will be the one that runs and the diff will be automatically rescheduled to the next day. If the start times are different this hidden conflict rule will not apply and both jobs will then run on the 1st and 16th

For you storage location differences, one you have created the job stages how I showed in the picture if you then click on the storage section on the left you will see that you can define different storage per stage so can choose you tape drives and media sets independently.

EDIT: just for info 9.x policies worked very slightly differently from 10.x through 2010 R3 policies as such you are kind of jumping 2 revisions of policy design when you switch from 9.x to 2012. Also there are some things relating to job scheduling in BE 2012 compared with previous versions that we have received feedback against and therefore some changes are already coming in BE 2014 (which is currently being beta tested and will be released later this year)

EDIT2: Just realized my screenhsot does not quite match that your differential between 1st and 15th go to different storage than the differentials from 16th to end of month - I will see if I can come up with a way to do that.

[Colin_Weaver]

Hmm OK I got close with above but not sure we can do exactly what you want

You could get close by using the above, idea and

1) Sending all jobs to trhe same media set

2) making the full jobs start as an overwrite

3) make the differentil job start with append

4) Setting the append period in the media set to maybe 17days (to cover from 16th till end of 31 day month), setting the overwrite protection to at 27days (to allow for a 28 day month)

However the exact length of the append period will be impossible to get 100% correct and can of course be shortened if you can't get a whole week onto 1 tape. You will therefore have to almost certainly remove tapes from your library on monring of 16th and morning of 1st to meet your goal.

I am not sure this exact scenario is planned for fix in BE 2014 so you probably should consider using the create option at the top of these forums to submit an idea explaining what you would like to achieve. We treat ideas as enhancement requests

[Colin_Weaver · Accepted solution]

OK I just checked a beta install of BE 2014 and you can do what you want in the next version of BE.

bascially you would do almost what I showed in the first/BE 2012 screenshot in my earlier answer, but there is a new option against the month schedule choices for selected dates which would then let you create 2 differential stages one covering 2nd to 15th and one covering 17th to 31st (as per my screenshot attached to this update)

End results for BE 2014 would be 4 stages in the job

- 1 full for 1st

- 1 full for 16th

- 1 differential for 2nd through 15th

- 1 differential for 17th through 31st

With this scenario you would not have to set the start times to match between the stages as the dates would stop the conflicts and you can define different storage configs in the storage section against each stage to allow you to target different tapes (partitons in library, media sets etc) as you did in 9.x

[Leo_Young]

Ok, Thanks for your help. From what you post above, I can make the conclusion:

What Policies I created in BE9, can't work with BE2012 but work with other versions other than BE2012.

That is really a bad news for me.

So what I can do is to change backup Policies, or I choose to downgrade to use BE2010.

And as I know from some reports, BE2102 was exposed some serious bugs and wasn't fixed until SP3 was released. I hope that It won't happen again with BE2014. I don't want to be a lab mouse.

And as BE2012 is using license file for legal usage. Can this license file be used for BE2014 ( I mean without paying more money to get BE2014 copy ) ?

[Colin_Weaver]

Most of the key problems in BE 2012 were design issues where we had taken the product in a direction that did not really address some customer's requirements. The scheduler had to be redesigned because of long standing issues with things like Daylight Savings (DST) changes etc. Unfortunately during this redesign of the scheduler some options were removed and it then came to light that there were some common schedule scenarios that we hadn''t understood were being actively used by multiple customers. Your BE 9.1 scheduler would therefore be part of this (although to be honest your chosen schedule is one of the less common ones.) and from the two screenshots I provided it is clear that we have returned the ability you have asked about in the next version.

With regards the license file, you will need new license and if you are on a current maintenance agreement with us then recieving an updated set of license is part of that agreement. If you are not on a current mainteneance agreement then please note the comment at the bottom of the main post in this blog:

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

that states:

*We are still working through the exact eligibility requirements for customers no longer current on maintenance and will provide an update ahead of general availability (GA).

Please be aware the beta registrations are now closed and that blog therefore does contain some comments about signing up etc that are no longer possible.

[Leo_Young]

Thanks again for your information.