Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations strongm on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Is Backup Exec The Most Troublesome Software Ever

Status
Not open for further replies.

ElijahBaley

IS-IT--Management
May 4, 2001
1,598
GB

Or What.


G
"r tape loading error"
 
ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT BACKUPEXEC:

When the BE SQL Agent somehow doesn't see a database that you specifically select to backup, it treats it as a missing file. Thus is does NOT fail the job even though it skipped your database. The job will show up as successfull!

I mean, what genius designed this?!! I missed 2 weeks of backups on one of our key production databases because the SQL cluster had a problem that hid the database from BE. I don't care if the SQL Server is on fire, has a 10 trojan virus infections...whatever...if I tell my backup software to specifically backup a given database, it should not say a job is successfull unless is actually backed it up.
RIDICULOUS! Some software architect should be shot.

In addition, I just found out that BE (even the Enterprise version) cannot support backups of Active-Active SQL clusters. They'd never get another dime of my money at this point if I'd bought the Enterprise version of their product and I found this out. Luckily I only bought the standard version.

The people in this post who say BE causes no problems...have NOT used it a med/large business environment.

Used ArcServe a long time ago and found it pretty crappy as well. Is anyone EVER going to make a solid Backup software suite?

 
Skimmed a lot of the posts here. I agree with a fair amount except for the incessant WHINING! Learn how to write a program! Can any of you write code?
If so, try writing code to run on top of Windows. Now try to write that code for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, SQL, Exchange, etc. Now make that code run on any one of those platforms for any service release or service pack. Please. It's a wonder the damn thing runs at all! I hate to break this to all of you, but Windows sucks. It only runs well if you format the friggin drive every 6 months and reload the OS. Yet we expect the server OS to run indefinitely along with Exchange on top for years on end. Pleeeez. I think you all know what I'm getting at here...

The main problem with all of this is Microsoft. Focus your aggression on the real problem. There are so many environmental problems that a program faces when installed upon and running on Windows. MS-Security Patches and Service Packs will then break what you strove so hard to create and make work.

You whiners need to either write you own app or shut the @$#@ up. Don't buy Backup Exec if you hate it so much. Use NTBackup.
 
I have been running Backup exec for over 3 years in all versions of 8.X on NT4 using a Compaq tape library. in three years I only had 2 problems with BE they were both my own misconfigurations done in haste during a busy day. This system runs 7 days a week backing up 7 servers with 120 Gig of data on a full weekly backup 30 to 40 gig on a dailey differential backup and month end copy jobs for storage.
Instead of spending lots of time trying to convince everyone how bad you have it,why don't you spend some time with the software and learn how it works not how to try to make it do what YOU want. Software is written to be used in a specific way and that may not always be the way we think it should work. That is the leading cause of this type of complaint. The software works good if its configured and used correctly!!!
Sorry, I know how frustrating it can be to have things that don't work the way we think they should.
 
Quote "I agree with a fair amount except for the incessant WHINING!".

So you decided to make one long, pointless off-topic whine ?
 
Toddah,

I do agree with you. I backup over 45GIG from 6 servers and have no problems. One question for you that is off topic a little bit. Do you find your full backup growing and growing? Seems my back grows about 2 - 3 gig per backup even though files have not changed much in size.
 
I use BE to backup a 195GB and a 45GB SQL Server 2000 database and have no problems now that I am doing it correctly. The only issue I had with Veritas is that they did not advertise very well the problem with SQL Agent and SQL Server being on an active/passive cluster. Once I applied the hotfix, everything worked just fine. I did switch the way I backup my SQL databases, but I'm happy with BE 8.6.

-SQLBill
 
As a consultant, I am ashamed to say that I tell my clients with backup software, you have to go with the product that sucks the least! For me, that has been BENT. I have quite a few installs of BENT 8.6 with various agents and it seems to works pretty well. Most of my installs are on W2K.

There have been some quirks, I had the corrupt email issue pop up, at one point, my backup stopped working and the only fix Veritas had for me was to break it up into 3 jobs, and at least one client a month has some new issue that I finally resolve with some Veritas registry hack into their software.

That being said, I just had to deal with ArcServe. Almost no support database, their support guy was a joke compared to the Veritas guys and the product seemed so much less intuitive than BENT.

But, with BENT 8.6 I did an Authoritative Restore on a DC, recovered a failed Exchange 2000 server that was also a DC and various file recoveries with no issue.
 
I have to change my opinion. I used to agree that BE sucked but ... after bothering to RTFM ... I now find it easy to use and reliable (except the Exchange Mailbox Backup).

The only thing I don't like (and never have) is the cluttered feel of the admin console .... and 9 is even worse .... still can't have it all. :)
 
Veritas Backup sucks !!!!!!!!!!!

I have worked on AS/400 internal drive and external Magstar cartridge systems for 4 years and literally NEVER had a single problem outside of an occassional bad type.

Christ, I am still trying figure this Veritas non-sense out after 4 months !!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top