After struggling with version 10 and finding several nasty bugs and lousy tech support, I am moving to a different solution. I've been using BackupExec since version 6 and this is the absolute worst given the cost and effort.
The worst problem is the coruption of the catalog when a backup job fails. This is a reproducible problem without a fix at this point. The backups fail because of a clustered SQL server failing over to the secondary and BE doesnt understand that the drive letters have changed. I can live with the "failed" job since BE is just complaining but after having to rebuild the catalog twice after this failure, it's not acceptable. The failure is only on differential backups, full backups fail also but do do corrupt the catalog.
Then trying to get BE to backup to disk and then migrate to tape took a call to the local rep to complain about the lousy with poor english support person I had to deal with. Once I got someone I could communicate with, they came up with a workaround but they did not understand policies. I had to work that out on my own.
The topped is that every so often, BE services will fail for no apparent reason. Once this happens, I have to restart the server for BE to start working again. This happen on Jan 1st right in the middle of a 1.5 Tb backup. I was able to recover with some effort on my part and I was able to do remotely instead of having to drive in. But the fact of the matter is that BE takes far too much babysitting to be an effective enterprise tool.
If anyone has had a recent bakeoff, contact me privately. My last bakeoff for a client was between BE, Tivoli and BakBone. BakBone won but their support was marginal. So Tivoli was used instead. Tivoli worked but it was pretty complicated. I'm looking at Commvault as a possible solution.
Comments and ideas?
MikeS
Home of the book "Network Security Using Linux"
The worst problem is the coruption of the catalog when a backup job fails. This is a reproducible problem without a fix at this point. The backups fail because of a clustered SQL server failing over to the secondary and BE doesnt understand that the drive letters have changed. I can live with the "failed" job since BE is just complaining but after having to rebuild the catalog twice after this failure, it's not acceptable. The failure is only on differential backups, full backups fail also but do do corrupt the catalog.
Then trying to get BE to backup to disk and then migrate to tape took a call to the local rep to complain about the lousy with poor english support person I had to deal with. Once I got someone I could communicate with, they came up with a workaround but they did not understand policies. I had to work that out on my own.
The topped is that every so often, BE services will fail for no apparent reason. Once this happens, I have to restart the server for BE to start working again. This happen on Jan 1st right in the middle of a 1.5 Tb backup. I was able to recover with some effort on my part and I was able to do remotely instead of having to drive in. But the fact of the matter is that BE takes far too much babysitting to be an effective enterprise tool.
If anyone has had a recent bakeoff, contact me privately. My last bakeoff for a client was between BE, Tivoli and BakBone. BakBone won but their support was marginal. So Tivoli was used instead. Tivoli worked but it was pretty complicated. I'm looking at Commvault as a possible solution.
Comments and ideas?
MikeS
Home of the book "Network Security Using Linux"