Backup Exec 2012 Wrong Direction with Enterprise Server Option
In Backup Exec 2010, you have the standard backup options: Full, Differential and Incremental. Out of the box, however, the incremental backup doesn't work very well because it doesn't track moved and deleted files. So, If were to perform a full backup of 1 TB data, rename 500 GB of data, perform an incremental backup, a restore would want to restore 1.5 TB of data. The solution was to spend an extra $580 on the "Advanced Disk Backup Option" in order to enable True Image Restore, which does allow Backup Exec 2010 to be intelligent enough to track renamed and deleted files during an incremental backup. Many believed that True Image Restore should be part of the core product and hoped that would be done with the 2012 version. However, Symantec went the other direction with it. The "Advanced Disk Backup Option", "Central Admin Server Option" and "Shared Storage Option" have been rolled into the "Enterprise Server Option" instead. The list price for Backup Exec 2012 with basic maintenance is 1115.40 and the Enterprise Server Option adds 3357.40. So, in order to get Backup Exec 2012 with a fully functioning incremental backup, it costs 4472.80. I have not found a competing product that charges extra for a functioning incremental backup. The competitors offer this function with a price closer to the base cost of Backup Exec. This change with the ADBO is putting Backup Exec at a competitive disadvantage to prospective SMB customers that don't need the CASO or SSO options. Customers that purchase the base product without ESO essentially have only one choice for backups, a full backup, because restoring from incremental backups without True Image Restore can be quite a mess. I hope Symantec will reconsider this decision and roll "True Image Restore" into the core product in the future to give all customers the benefit of a fully functioning incremental backup.
Yet another backup to tape speed issue
Dell Power Edge 1950 /server 2008 /20 gigs of ram /Broadcom BCM5708C NetXtreme II GigE With 1 port to san, 1 to Catalyst 4500 L3 switch /dedicated server for backup exec 2014. Used to be our old mailbox server. Tape drive is a Quantum superloader 3 connected by SAS2 Equalogic PS4100X in raid 50 with dual switches for the storage network Drive settings on the drive are currently: Hardware compression: Enabled Block size: 256KB Buffer size: 1MB Buffer count: 20 High water count: 0 Read single block mode: Disabled Write single block mode: Enabled Read SCSI pass-through mode: Disabled Write SCSI pass-through mode: Enabled Currently Just the backup of our FP server is 3.4TB and currently takes 27hours to complete on a full backup. Job Rate is 2,449 which roughly gives me a 41 MB/s transfer rate which unfortunately is below the minimum stream speed for the tape drive so the tape drive is going idle quite a bit which is probably the major cause of the jobs taking so long. Current job is a cluster job backing up the HA vm's current file is a 1.3TB VHD that has been running for a number of hours. Basically I am trying to figure out what I can do to speed this up. We Purchased the ADBO a few years ago but from what I have read lately it seems that offhost backup is fairly useless with virtual machines? And even then, would it make much of a difference with only one gigabit lead to the san. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Backup Exec 2010 R2 - tape usage best practice
Hi All, I've got LTO-4 tape drive and using BE 2010 R2 running now, in my backup job I've selected a directory which contains 1.1 TB of files that is a backup file from a 3rd party application (already deduplicated), however after long writing time i found out that the LTO-4 tape 1.6 TB is not enough ? it asked for another tape ? since the difference is not that big, then i insert the LTO-3 tape. would that be ok for the weekly full archive to tape ? using 2 tape in one backup set ? LTO-4 and LTO-3 pair ? any kind of help and suggestion would be greatly appreciated. Cheers, AWTBackup Exec 2010 and Dell MD3000i VSS provider issues
Hello, We are trying to use BE2010 to set up backups for a Hyper-V cluster on Windows Server 2008 R2. Our SAN is an iSCSI Dell MD3000i. We have installed the hardware provider on all the Hyper-V hosts, and it shows up properly in vssadmin list providers: vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool (C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp. Provider name: 'SmVssProvider' Provider type: Hardware Provider Id: {24e4e8a3-69cb-4370-8b7b-c5276cd49765} Version: 10.60.01 Provider name: 'Microsoft Software Shadow Copy provider 1.0' Provider type: System Provider Id: {b5946137-7b9f-4925-af80-51abd60b20d5} Version: 1.0.0.7 If we enable Advanced Disk-Based backup in Backup Exec to move the backup snapshot to the backup server, it does not find the provider and comes up with this error: The job failed with the following error: Backup Exec could not locate a Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) software or hardware snapshot provider for this job. Select a valid VSS snapshot provider for the target computer. If we disable the Advanced Disk-Based backup option, that error doesn't show up, however, we get an error saying The job failed There's this additional information logged by Backup Exec: - AOFO: Initialization failure on: "VRTSRV::\\Hyper-V.domain.int\Hyper-V?HA?VM\VM1". Advanced Open File Option used: Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). V-79-10000-11226 - VSS Snapshot error. The Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) snapshot provider selected returned: "Unexpected provider error". Ensure that all provider services are enabled and can be started. Check the Windows Event Viewer for details. The Event Log on the target computer shows: Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error calling routine DeviceIoControl(IOCTL_VOLUME_GET_GPT_ATTRIBUTES). hr = 0x80070002, The system cannot find the file specified. . Operation: Processing PreFinalCommitSnapshots Executing Asynchronous Operation Context: Provider Name: SmVssProvider Provider Version: 10.60.4 Provider ID: {24e4e8a3-69cb-4370-8b7b-c5276cd49765} Current State: DoSnapshotSet Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Error calling a routine on a Shadow Copy Provider {24e4e8a3-69cb-4370-8b7b-c5276cd49765}. Routine details PreFinalCommitSnapshots({c9faf664-b4bb-4ce7-b975-9b423a6554d0}, 2) [hr = 0x80042302, A Volume Shadow Copy Service component encountered an unexpected error. Check the Application event log for more information. ]. Operation: Executing Asynchronous Operation Context: Current State: DoSnapshotSet We have contacted Dell assuming it was a problem with their Hardware VSS provider software, but they insisted the problem was with Backup Exec and that hardware VSS provider is working as designed. The BE2010 documentation states that SmVssProvider for MD3000i is supported. On a related note, we have also tried DPM 2010 with the provider and the same error occurs in the VSS provider:http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.dataprotectionmanager&tid=b608a39e-b0cc-4f9c-b126-98ceb723476e&mid=b608a39e-b0cc-4f9c-b126-98ceb723476e&cat=&lang=&cr=&sloc=&p=1 Again, Dell claims it's not their problem, so any help in getting this to work for us would be appreciated. We're interested in Backup Exec but can't license if this doesn't work. If the problem turns out to be indeed in the VSS provider, please let us know so we can refer Dell to the official Symantec response. Thank you very much.
Synthetic Backups
We curently have arounf 50tb of files on our file server, split over various jobs that are Full to tape and Incrementals to disk (and duplicated to tape). I want to move to disk based for all the fulls (synthetic) with duplication to tape. 1. Would the synthetic full from disk to tape be any quicker than going directly to tape? 2. Would the synthetic full fromtape to tape be any quicker than going directly to tape? 3. Could incrementals run whilst the synthetic full was being run or would it be superseded - (I want to increase the frequency of incrementals) thanks!