Skipping Backups

[Eric_Goche]

How do you skip a backup if the remote client is unavailable?

If a client is unavailable (power outage, user turning off a computer when they shouldn't, etc.), the previous backup is overwritten with a 2k file.

I need to find out how to set up the backup so that, if a client is unavailable, Backup Exec leaves the previous backup alone.

My knowledge of backups in general, let alone a program such as this, extends all the way back to maybe two months ago. Because of this, it's very possible that I may have missed an option.

[Renuka_-]

Hello,
If the remote server is unavailable the Backup job will end up in error.
NOTE : If we do not receive your reply within two business days, this post would be marked assumed answeredand would be moved toanswered questions pool.

[Peter_Ludwig]

If you put a command into the 'pre command' section like:
"dir \\servername\c$" and check the box "run job only if pre command was succesful" the backup will not start in case the server (or PC) is not available.

I've just tried that and it works.

Renuka: we are well aware that the job returns an error when the source is not available., this is not the problem. The problem is, that an other backup file is overwritten with no useful data, even when the backup fails, so that it is no longer available.

greetings
Peter

[Eric_Goche]

Peter...

Much thanks for your suggestion. I made a modification to the pre-command, however:

ping servername

When I tried it with your suggestion, the following error occured:

Error (2): The system cannot find the file specified.

I attempted variations of your suggestion, but each one ended with the same error. However, since the entire goal was to ensure a computer was available to be backed up, pinging it seemed to make as much sense as a directory listing.

Again, thanks for the assist!

Eric

[Ken_Putnam]

Ping may not work as well as the Dir command, since once the OS boots, and the NIC is initialized, the ping will succeed even the OS is hung for what ever reason, or if the Server service is not responding etc.

[Peter_Ludwig]

I also tried ping first, but it seems it does not return the necessary error codes.
As the user user which BE is running needs to be able to access the data anyway, the dir seemed to be the logical attempt.
Of course you may use any command which returns the approbriate error code.

But actually there should be a suggestion made to Veritas/Symantec that BE should check the availability of the source before overwriting anything.

greetings
Peter

[Eric_Goche]

This makes sense and I'm now trying to determine how we can make this work. Unfortunately, using the Dir command fails with the aforementioned error (...cannot find the file specified.)

I've tried using "\\servername\c$", but that also fails with an "Access is denied." error message.

According to the the help page (http://support.veritas.com/docs/262355), it states:

To resolve this issue, change the Remote Agent for Windows Servers service to run using the "Local System Account".

And, of course, BE is already set up to do that.

We'll just live with pinging until we can devote more time to figuring this out. (Fortunately, the systems that are being backed up are used on a pretty-much daily basis...so if the OS is hung, we should be able to catch it in time.)

[Peter_Ludwig]

You probably couls also set up a 'net use *.....' which tries to connect to the specific PC/server (and where you could give a user/pwd), but I have not tried that. There should be many possible commands which could be used to check a source's availability

greetings
Peter