BESR 8 large morning incrementals

[Program_Earth]

We configure BESR to create a full image on Sunday morning and incrementals are generated throughout the week on the hour during business hours. This works very well on all previous versions used dating back to the V2i days yet since BESR8 has been applied all 8am incrementals are massive in comparison to what's normally created. The first incremental of the day is always a little larger than the ones that follow for obvious reasons but instead of 100MB or so BESR8 makes incrementals that are several gig. This is consistent on all BESR8 installs which span several sites.

Has anyone else noticed this and hopefully Symantec will create a fix.

Thank you,

[RBall]

I do basically the same thing, I have not noticed this issue. Our first of the morning incrementals range from a few MB to a few hundred MB but they are right on track with what we saw on v7.03

Are you defragging or otherwise optimizing your drives overnight?  Everytime you defrag your next incremental can approach the size of a full depending on how much it moves.

We defrag weekly on Saturdays and run our fulls on Sundays to avoid this issue.

/RB

Message Edited by RBall on 03-07-2008 01:20 PM

[Program_Earth]

Thanks for your response.

None of these servers are doing anything other than simply sitting there receiving the occasional late night email and normal early morning Exchange routines. All previous versions to 8 created 100MB or so on its first incremental of the morning yet every morning with V8 creates at least 1gig and sometimes 50% of the used drive space. I appreciate that BESR pays attention to sectors that have changed, not files and thus a defrag would create a large incremental yet this is not happening and every BESR8 installed machine is producing the same overly large incremental.

[CQ]

Running Vista Business.  I am experiencing the same issue.   I had been using 7.03 with good results.  I do a full set monthly with incrementals daily.  I defrag manually (auto schedule has been disabled) and have not done it recently so that is not an issue.  Last week I upgraded to 8.01 and saved job settings.  When 8.01 did its first incremental it took hours and was the same size as a baseline backup.  I decided to start a new backup set so did a new baseline backup.  The next 3 days the daily incrementals were what I would call in the "normal" size range.  Yesterday ithe incremental was full size again (approx 57 gb).  I had not added software and no defrag had been done,  Never had this problem with 7.03 so I have rolled back to that version.

Called tech support yesterday and they want me to uninstall 7 run a batch file that "cleans" things up and reinstall 8 and try again.  Thought I would try the forums first before I waste my time trying that.   Given that someone else is having the same issue indicates there is a problem.   I also noted that that my baseline backups with 8.01 are over 9 gb larger than my 7.03 baselines.  All settings (compression etc) are the same.  Tech support had no explanation for that.  This large incremental problem is a real issue for time and external storage capacity.  Something is going on with 8.01.

Additionally, tried 8.01 on a brand new Vista Businees machine and it was freezing and causing lockups that required a power off.  Put 7.03 on it and it works perfectly.

Any help would be appreciated and if I may briefly editorialize I am tired and frustrated being a beta tester for Symantec.  When BESR 7 came out there were OBVIOUS issues  that should have been caught before the product was released and I was forced to deal with tech support to obtain a solution.  Thanks!

[RBall]

Not what you want to hear, but I tried a Vista Business system (my workstation) in v8 and gave up. I could never keep the manager connected. I have other issues boiling at the moment so for me I choose to ignore it for the time being and continue backing up my workstation with 7.03.

/RB

[Program_Earth]

An Engineer from Symantec contacted me by phone today to see what was happening. I provided him with the logs from the seast app along with screenshots from 2 servers that we have running 8.01 that clearly show minimal hourly activity except the first attempts in the morning which are huge. Occasionally the application makes an incremental the same size as a baseline which these screenshots featured.

The Engineer didn't comment that he was aware of an issue but this is happening on all the servers we've applied 8.01 to and so I hope the issue is widespread enough for Symantec to take seriously and release a fix soon.

I agree regarding the feeling that we're beta testing for this organisation. Their latest release of AV being Endpoint is dreadful at the moment. It can't be that difficult to test these applications internally for a month or so before release. I'm happy to point out issues but when the problem is on all machines at different locations it suggests minimal testing was done - which is of great concern, given the importance of this server saviour software.

[David_F]

Coming back to this, have any of you seen the same issues now with version 8.03 or 8.5?