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Symantec Backup Exec 2012 problems

This topic was created by Chris Mellor 1 .

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  1. Chris Mellor 1

    Symantec Backup Exec 2012 problems

    Are there any? We're hearing there are and that users dislike it quite a lot.

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    1. mathuna
      Reply Icon

      Re: Symantec Backup Exec 2012 problems

      It is certainly a big change from previous versions, but a worthwhile one once you get used to it. Moving from a job centric view to a server centric one is a bit like moving from imperial to metric. Takes a bit of getting used to, but makes a lot more sense in the long run.

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  2. dfgalla

    BackupExec 2012

    I have used BackupExec for many years. I estimate my upgrade to BE2012 has so far cost me in the region of 80 hours of additional work. Before I never needed the technical support. This version is so full of problems that it is quite impossible to use unless you have a proper tech support contract to help you to get it to work - rather than becoming more intuitive, it is full of dozens of hidden rules you need to know to get it to work but which are impossible to guess, in my experience. Some are to work around bugs, others are just bad design. As for the new "server centric" interface - it certainly looks prettier once it is all working (nice red/amber/green traffic lights for each pc), but it has greatly increased the number of jobs I need setup to get everything working. Previously you could define "selection lists" and separately define "jobs" that use those lists, so that multiple jobs could share a "selection list". Now "selection lists" are gone - you need to define your selections for each job. All very frustrating. On the positive side, BE2012 has much better "bare metal restore" capabilities - so if your server goes down you are much more likely to be able to get things up and running quickly than with old versions.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    Symantec Backup Exec 2012 SDR or Simplified Disaster Recovery

    SDR or Simplified Disaster Recovery - a complete nightmare.

    Simplified it certainly has but I think someone at Symantec may have misunderstood the brief.

    Simplified was not supposed to be to take away and break a load of functionality.

    So far I have spent over a week in time trying to get it to do what IDR did very well.

    For the record I have worked with every version good and bad over the years from BE and have been through this type of pain with duff versions before but nothing quite this bad.

    With IDR it was quite straightforward to do a bare-metal recovery of all your servers in the event of total loss of access to your LIVE site building and any hardware as it is all destroyed or inaccessible.

    Let me work through a scenario to show the types of problems encountered:

    So you create the SDR DVD/CD on the 01/03/2012 at 10am

    Then you need to invoke Disaster Recovery (for whatever reason) say on the 12/12/2012 at 14:30. You do not have any servers built.

    When you try to recover the first server (a lightly important server this being as it is the Media Server) you cannot because the DVD/CD only knows of the media created before the time of the SDR DVD/CD creation.

    Symantec say to do this you must have a copy of the .DR file – and they say to get this from the server on the LIVE site !!!

    So to make this work they suggest you need to put a copy of the file on say a USB device every time your backup jobs run.

    If you run a month turnaround of tapes then following their advice you will need 31 USB devices to keep with the offsite Media and every time you use that Media you must update the corresponding USB device.

    Eventually when you manage to run a Disaster Recovery on your Disaster Recovery Kit for the first time and then for some reason you need to run it again the system restores without any errors but when you reboot the server there is no boot MBR on the boot disk and windows repair utilities cannot find any Windows OS install on any devices. For some reason it will not recover the OS to the same box a second time.

    To fix this you if you are running HP servers you must run smart start and run the system erase utility - and yes you must delete all temporary logins. Then it might work ok, but you might need to repeat the above until it works.

    At the end of all this if you have not lost the will to live and you boss has not killed you for the delay in recovering the servers then you will have recovered your media server and now can recover the rest of the servers.

    I have raised this and more with Symantec. We have had long discussions going nowhere on the phone to persons in their call-centres and been sent various videos to watch – which were no use what so ever. Our problems have been escalated all the way up but so far nothing.

    We are currently not upgrading any of our customers to 2012 and will in the absence of a workable version (because it is more than a fix that is needed) will start to look at upgrades. It’s a real shame because 2010 IDR worked pretty well for us and our customers.

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    1. Chris Mellor 1
      Reply Icon

      Re: Symantec Backup Exec 2012 SDR or Simplified Disaster Recovery

      It begins to look as if BackupExec 2012 is trying to be too many things to too many people an use cases and cannot achieve it. The product has to effectively fork. Existing users who can't migrate get BackupExec Classic and the ones who can get BackupExec New. It's a painful choice but looks inescapable.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SDR

    Just discovered another bug if you exclude any file on the C drive.

    IE a notepad txt file in a TEST directory call mytest.txt containing the word test doc.

    Then SDR green light goes out and it claims the backup is on longer backing up all the required files for SDR to work !!.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: SDR

      That is outlined in the requirements and recommendations for running and creating and SDR. Exclusion of anything on a critical system drive does in fact render the SDR light to turn "off".

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  5. SJR

    New UI

    Couple of relevant items to this discussion here:

    Trolling a break fix support forum tends to result in a break fix perspective. Here are a few other bits of news that are relevant to the discussion.

    BE 2012 SP1 is available here https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/announcing-backup-exec-2012-sp1-available-now

    MSExchange.org Readers’ Choice award voted on by the readers http://bit.ly/KcLz3p

    PC Pro predicts the new interface will “simplify and streamline the entire backup process.”

    http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/software/374467/symantec-backup-exec-2012

    CRN touts the new UI as “worlds away from its predecessor in ease of use.” http://www.crn.com/news/data-center/232600222/symantec-backup-exec-2012-is-all-about-the-cloud.htm

    Gartner has also commented on the positive feedback about the UI in a forthcoming publication.

    ---

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  6. PJR

    BUExec 2012. Everybody seems to discuss the fondamentals ...

    Ok. A new interface. bla, bla, bla. I hate it, but its not my point for now. After working with that software for weeks now, I can tell two things:

    1) Time wasted running this program has doubled if not trippled. Baby-Sitting this has become absolutely ridiculous. I know this software enough now for what I need. Which I consider basic. It consists of backing up 1 DC, 1 File Server, 1 Sharepoint, 1 SQL Server to a disk, then to a tape. I can assure you I am not a case of lurning curve. This software is filled up with bugs. All over !!! At first, jobs were randomly disapearing on the screen. After some service call to Symantec, the tech there (after waiting three weeks without reliable BU) destroyed the credentials to a point I had to wipe out (again) my server, and start from scratch. Database errors are on the daily menu. Deleting Backup-Sets leads to totaly random results. They are not in fact deleted from the disk, which gets overfilled rapidly. Job that failed are not clean-up et.c. Worse, deleted backup sets reapear from time to time. Nobody at Symantec can claimed they ever tested it. It is so easy to bomb it just after a fresh install I cannot believe any of those unprofessional and irresponsible Symantec's declarations. Same ridiculous bugs we have seen for decades are there again. Like the famous "Backup Succeeded, but some files were omited". Then you discover that the omitted files are from Symantec End Point Protection ... Silly !!! Or the ridiculous database error because it suposely cannot BU the database log, et.c. et.c.

    2) But there's far worse then that, restoring fails to an almost 100% rate. If you feel like throwing your company in total inability to restore whatever, feel free to instll BUExec 2012 immediately.

    Have I said the new interface is stupid, and inneficient ???

    This software is total crap.

    Paul Jr

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  7. NorthwoodsDude

    Enrique Salem, President and CEO

    Dear Enrique:

    Read this article:

    http://www.consumerelectronicsnet.com/article/How-Symantec-Broke-Backup-Exec-2092572

    And this thread:

    http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1175491

    And this post:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/28/backup_exec_2012_users/

    Sorry, no matter how much you pay google to hype your product, we still can find out the truth.

    What an unmitigated disaster your product has become.

    Really, this is not that complicated. Backing up data is simply stated, a copy of the data in another location that can be used to recover the data if the original is corrupted, deleted, or destroyed. Backup should automate this process, with some ability to report that the backup completed. BEXEC 2012 can barely run a straight forward backup job of a windows server, it can’t run more than one consecutive full backup of my exchange environments without failing on the next job, it has in-comprehensible error messages that vary from job to job, if I were to follow the conflicting resolutions I would disable my exchange server but have great backup jobs!

    Here is what I would suggest as a possible solution:

    Run every job as a “test-scan”, surely you can design something that will at least pretend to back up my network and exhibit a fancy progress bar along with generating “success” messages? At least I won’t feel as bad and I will be able to show my boss that my hours of working on fixing these errors was time well spent? Would bribery help? Maybe I could buy you and your engineers a round?

    Backup Exec 2012 is possibly the worst upgrade that has ever come out of Symantec.

    We no longer use Symantec AV / Endpoint protection, we have started to hate on Symantec Ghost, and we never were able to get the knack of using NAC in an enterprise environment. Symantec should get an award for products from hell. It seem like you have a personal vendetta for IT administrators.

    The only reason we still use brightmail is because it actually started working after years of bizarre internal bugs.

    Please don’t change brightmail, please, please, please.

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    1. PJR
      Reply Icon
      Thumb Up

      BUExec 2012 will never recover cause it needs at completely re-written.

      Well A nice lady from India - working for Symantec - blocked me on Symantec web site because I wrote Backup Exec Services were stalled again and again and again ... :):):) The crap at Symantec is on and healty !!!

      After month of 2012, I know now I do not hate this software because of reluctance to change. I hate it because it is totaly unreliable.

      It's been written before and I repeat it again. This product is crap. Your chances to recover your data with this product are less then mediocre.

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  8. erikf

    Centralized solution for monitoring all locations for back ups at the same time

    Hello,

    We are managing multiple customers and spending lot of time checking if backups are successful. Customers are mostly using Symantec Backup Exec and Acronis. I tried setting notifications, but then I got too many e-mails daily and could not simply read all of them. Sometimes I need to ask firewall/e-mail admin to allow relaying. Does anyone knows if there is any centralized solution able to monitor all locations at the same time.

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    1. NancyHurley
      Reply Icon

      Re: Centralized solution for monitoring all locations for back ups at the same time

      @erikf- While I realize this forum is not meant for vendor "commercials" and I generally refrain from that , seeing you asked and you seem to really need something to help better monitor and manage Backup Exec 2012- I will suggest taking a look at Bocada vpConnect. Bocada does centralized monitoring and reporting on Backup Exec 2012 (and previous versions) - the solution can monitor all backup activity from multiple servers, report on it in a central location for easy troubleshooting and policy analysis. It's web based , so multiple users can access the reports from any location, you can set alerts on errors and in general get a much better view to what's going on. If you are using the VM API integration- vpConnect can also correlate all vCenter information with the Backup Exec activity to give you a much deeper understanding of whats going on with your VM backups. Obviously happy to provide more info www.bocada.com/products

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  9. Chris Mellor 1

    Obviously - very obviously - a single pane of glass through which to see all your data protection activities and statuses is a darn good idea. It's surely a no-brainer. Bocada and Aptare are doing everyone a service here.

    Chris.

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  10. aieb

    horcm configuration

    Hello

    we have two storages AMS2500 one local and one remote

    and two servers in the local site with a P-VOL for each

    and two others in the remote site with a S-VOL for each

    I installed CCI Manager on servers

    Now I'd like to know how many instance horcm that we need

    thanks

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  11. Tom*-*

    Backup Exec = Crap

    Hi All,

    I just wanted to get your opinion on what backup software you can recommend.

    I've used Symantec Backup Exec for a number of years, but without going into too much detail, as i know you're all bored of this now, the software appears to have dissapeared up it's own arse.

    The reason however that we continue to use it however is that i can't name any other software that provides the same funtionalty, all be it thoeretical fuctionality in Symantec's case, that Backup Exec Provides. So we continue to use it even though i'm sick of it.

    So please let me know you're thoughts.

    Here's what i'm looking for:

    Must haves are:

    - Full Compatability with Windows 2012 - 2003 and everything in between.

    - Bare metal recovery ( to dissimilar hardware )

    - Granular recovery of Exchange (2013) and SQL ( for example ability to recover an individual message )

    - Ability to backup multiple servers with a single job.

    - Support for a tape drive

    - Email notifications

    - Support for backup to disk ( + deduplicatation + overwrites old data when it runs out of space )

    - Ability to backup a virtualisation host server ( VMWare and Hyper-V ) it's configuratation and contents

    - - In addition to this, this should support granular recovery of applications such exchange

    - - This should also understand how thick provisioning is configured and not backup a ton of free space

    - Telephone support, from competent people who answer the phone. ( Enterprise Level + Professional + Cheery Disposition )

    - Stable and reliable backups ( not too much to ask )

    Would be nice to have:

    - SLES 11 compatible agent would be nice

    - Ability to backup a virtual machine to and offline virtual machine on another server

    - P to V , V to P, V to V , Y.M.C.A

    - The job monitor in Backup Exec was nice - anything like that would be good

    Any help is greatly appriciated.

    Thanks

    Tom

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    1. sisk
      Reply Icon

      Re: Backup Exec = Crap

      I've gotta say I don't miss Backup Exec at all. What a POS that system was.

      About 2 months back we switch from Networker (what we had been running after dumping Symantecs turd where it belonged) to Unitrends and I'm impressed with it thus far. The one feature I miss that they don't have is support for bar code readers and I'm told that's coming in 1.7 (we're currently on 1.6.somethnig).

      The way the system works, at least how we have it set up, is that it backs up to its own internal drive and then, once per week, rolls those 'incremental forever' backups that we're doing into a virtual master and sends it off to the tape. We do Windows 2003-2008 and I'm told it can handle 2012 as well. We also do Exchange (yes, it can recover granularly), SQL, and VM Ware. We're told it can do bare metal but haven't had to put this to the test yet. Their support people are friendly and helpful and you can actually understand them (no call centers in Asia with techs whose accents are so thick it would be easier to have them speak their native tongues and run it through a translator). I have not, yet, gotten the appliance to sing YMCA. I'll put that on my 'try to do' list. :-D I belive it has a Linux client for you SLES boxen, but I'd have to double check and I'm not at the office right now. Our reliability is around the 98-99% mark. We've had a few failures, but they were cleared with a call to the support folks.

      Now the downsides: The UI is, in my opinion a little on the clunky side. Not unusable or anything, but it could definitely be more intuitive. Also, it archives to tape but it won't do a direct-to-tape backup (or maybe it can and we just chose not to. I can't remember).

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  12. Artov

    Artov

    I wish I had read all this before buying the current version of Backup Exec.

    I know- don't make assumptions! But after years of using the product you expect evolution rather than dissolution. Even the service pack 2 (so called) doesn't seem to fix anything. How to destroy a company by ruining your product. Beats Ratner hands down....

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