Synthetic Backup with BE 2012

[Guev007]

I've been trying to run a synthetic backup job of a big server for the last couple of days. By default the job creates a full backup, an incremental, and the synthetic. The Full backup runs and hangs up every time I've tried it.

Has anyone out there tried this with BE 2012, and if so,  has it worked?

Regular full backups of the server work fine, just too slow due to the nature of the files I'm tring to back up.

[teiva-boy]

Any synthetic since the ver 12 (including 12.5, 2010) has never worked when you had large file counts, say over 50,000 files.  Which in today's numbers, is miniscule.  I'm not sure if it was a SQL Express issue, performance issue, or limitation of BE.  It's just never worked well for me, ever.

[lmosla]

Have you ran all of your live updates? Backup Exec 2012 Service Pack 2 has became available via live update at the beginning of this last week. 

[lmosla]

also, I just found this article that looks like it might be related, anyway it's worth checking it out.  http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH190508 

[sagarsonker]

Do the regular full backups finish? Does the target disk storage where the Synthetic's Full is backing up data contain sufficient space?

[Guev007]

Imosla, I'm have all the updates installed, including SP2.

Sagarsonker, a regular full completes fine. The problem happens when I select the Synthetic backup and the job tries to run the first full, it hangs. Storage has plenty of space.

[lmosla]

How does the incremental job run?  

EDIT: I apologise, the above comment was meant for a different post.

Guev007,  a couple of things to check:  

make sure you dont have any alerts that need a response & Windows System and application event errors

[Guev007]

I can't start the incremental until the Full is completed.

[sagarsonker]

Guev007, from the full backup that has completed successfully, is it possible for you to to give an approximate number or size of files being backed up?

[Guev007]

sagarsonker, the last susccessfull backup took 76 hours to complete. The total sized backed up was 678 GB, and approximately 2 million files. File size are anywhere between 2k to 100k.

I've looked into an image backup, but that doesn't seem possible with backup exec. Off Host backup I don't think is possible either because the media server and the client server are on different OS versions, and if I read correctly the BE admin guide says that the servers have to be on the same version of Windows.

So that's why I've tried the synthetic backup since I thought it could be a solution to our problem, but haven't had any luck with it.

I got tired of wasting time with BE and right now I'm testing Dell AppAssure, which so far seems very promising. Hopefully that will be the cure to all the headaches with BE.