Hi All,
Well, again, we're having issues with RD1000 cartridges and Symantec software. Seems like a never-ending cycle here (in another thread, we've had over a year's worth of problems with ejection of RD1000 carts and Backup Exec 12--but I won't bore you with the details here...).
This time, I believe the issue doesn't have anything to do with the RD1000's specifically, but it's just caused by poor product design and lack of forethought about backup media and industry trends.
We have BESR8. We are setting up a simple rotation: Each day, a non-admin, non-computer-savvy user simply sticks in the "Monday" (or Tues, or whatever it is) cartridge. They have no access to log in or check on things---they only push the Eject button and replace the cartridge. Each night, at 10:00pm, BESR creates its image to the RD1000. The next day, they eject the cartridge, replacing it with the next day's cartridge, and the cycle continues. We also have "Monthly" and Offsite cartridges that we swap back and forth offsite for added disaster protection. What's great is that each day, it simply creates a new "Base" recovery point to the cartridge and that's it: we can bare-metal recover the server using only the last-inserted cartridge.
That said: this product gets totally out of sync with what cartridge is in the drive, versus what it's thinking it needs to automatically optimize and remove. It will fill 2/3 of cartridge (say, Monday for example), then next Monday, it will not properly delete the prior backup on the Monday cartridge before filling it up and ending the backup due to lack of available disk space, despite that we have "automatic optimization" of the backup destination enabled.
Where's the "just overwrite whatever's on the removeable disk and update the database" option in the product? Where's the "optimize contents of target drive before running the backup" option?
I came across this kb article:
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/295314.htm which suggests running all backups to an "interim" volume, and then having a batch file copy over the data on the cartridge each day. This is because, as the article states, Backup Exec is designed such that it has no concept of what exists on each disk; rather it maintains a database that gets out of sync with what disk is in the drive. According to the article, in order to use removeable cartridges I have to invest in
another fixed hard drive for "temporary storage" because, by intentional design, BESR can't figure out what files are already on the removeable disk?
This is silly. For the cost of FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS for BESR I would expect your backup program to just be able to figure out what removable media is in the drive, what files are on the media, and deal with it. How hard can this be, Symantec?
Removeable hard disk cartridges have existed for several years now. They're not going away. They are growing by leaps and bounds in popularity. As an IT installer, we're fast on a path of replacing all of our "old tape" drives with removeable hard disks, as the capacity is increasing tremendously (RD1000's have a 500Gb version now) and the reliability and speed is much better versus tapes. And, as newer and larger cartridges emerge, we can simply upgrade the entire backup system by buying the bigger carts.
So now, I get to go to the various sites we've installed BESR in, and tell those clients that we need to invest in additional hardware just to make the initial backup solution work---a fixed drive just to make removable cartridges work. This is a joke!
When will Symantec produce a version of this product that just works? I'm getting so tired of trying new Symantec products and finding out I have to go through a bunch of hoops just to make them work as they should be designed in the first place.
-Dan
