Share your Feedback/Suggestions

[aychekay]

I understand that BESR has a feature in the Help menu to submit feedback but I'm curious what feedback you other BESR users are reporting. We use BESR 7 and 8.x, generally with RDX drives and occasionally with external hard drives. Here's a list of the feedback I can think of:

Suggestions:
Very Important: BUG!!! Changing backup job schedule should reset the backup jobs in the memory. We have noticed that changing a backup job time on the schedule from 10PM to 7PM will actually fire (2) backup jobs that night, one at 7PM and another at 10PM, unless we restart the BESR service. This occurs in both version 7 and version 8.

Very Important: Need the ability to allow previous recovery points to be deleted before starting a backup.

Very Important: BESR needs to be able to recognize recovery points that are only partial due to a network interruption or failure of the BESR software, and delete those partial recovery points to free up space.

Very Important: Need the ability to disable "hard drive recognition" which came out with version 8. Sometimes we want a backup job to run no matter which external hard drive is plugged in.

Very Important: Better Support for rotating media such as the RDX Drive. (BESR needs to be able to search through it's database of recovery points and see if they exist on the current piece of media, then make an intelligent decision about deleting that file. Suggest you do not allow incremental recovery point sets with removable media.)

Very Important: Better resource management when a server is under load. We have had a substantial amount of problems making backups of servers that have a single, overworked Hard Disk or have a failed drive in a RAID 5 array. Under those conditions we get snapshot errors or the service dies spontaneously without reporting anything or restarting itself.

Somewhat Important: More information reported upon successful backup, including the following details: Backup Run Time, Size of Backup File, Size of Recovery Point Set, Available Storage Space Left on Media

Somewhat Important: Off-site Copy produces errors when used with rotating removable media such as the RDX drive.

[Jon_R]

Those are all excellent suggestions and it would be nice to see other users' opinions on what they would like to see in future releases of the product as well. On the note of the first one, I would like to get more details about what is going on with that, perhaps you should start another thread so that we can look into that a little further.

[Chandler]

I definitely agree with aychekay's fourth point that the "hard drive recognition" or "drive alias" feature has caused many headaches. I don't ever have a problem with drive letters changing for external drives, but I do have problems with System Recovery 8.5 recognizing when I reconnect a drive that was already given an alias.

[GT-RBT]

I agree with Aychekay. These issues he raises are real and create hinderances in achieving successful backups for our clients on a predictable and reliable schedule.

Your attention to these issues in a future update or version is appreciated as the BESR 8.5 software really is a great application -- especially when used on a virtual platform.

[Joseph_L_]

Product enhancement requests can be submitted directly to Symantec product development by opening the Backup Exec System Recovery product interface and clicking on Help>Send Feedback and filling out the questionnaire that appears. Once the questionnaire is filled out, click on Submit at the bottom of the window to send it.

[krisla]

I absolutely agree with all the problems reported by aychekay, especilally of switching media. This is a real pain and keep me from using this product at my customers.

[AITMGT]

I've been a long time user of Backup Exec and only recently began using Backup Exec System Recovery. I have to say I really like it and I've done some hardware to hardware moves with success. I'm now rolling it out at a customer for their daily backup their 4 servers.

I immediately ran into all of the items mentioned above.

What scares me even more is finding this post from a year and a half ago addressing these issues. With users then submitting them to be corrected. And the problems still exist in today's newer versions.

I may have to rethink my backup choices for disaster recovery until these issues are addressed.

Symantec, I really like this tool. Please wake up and address that rotating hard drives is a feature we'd all like to see and will only compliment your product!

-I hope this thread gets woken back up. And yes, I've filled out the feature request form.

Jason Mueller
AITMGT

[itsupport6]

I cannot aggree more with the above parts of this post.

Very Important: Need the ability to disable "hard drive recognition" which came out with version 8. Sometimes we want a backup job to run no matter which external hard drive is plugged in.

Symantec, I really like this tool. Please wake up and address that rotating hard drives is a feature we'd all like to see and will only compliment your product!

EXTREMELY Important: Need the ability to allow previous recovery points to be deleted BEFORE starting a backup. 
If the drive would be out of space with the 3rd Recovery Point, it does no good at all to set the limit at 2 as the application will NEVER write it!  What good is that?

It isn't Customer Service if you don't LISTEN to your customers!  They WILL go somewhere else if for nothing else than someone to hear them gripe.

Charlie Preston
A-1 Voice & Data
(more time doing IT work than I would like to admit too...)