Since this blog is new, I thought I'd share a bit of history about how we came to be in this position of undesireable misery.
Between the 3 of us, we've been using Backup Exec for many years, back when it was "Veritas Backup Exec". It was a reliable product with a few irritating quirks, but on the whole it got the job of Backups done, and we managed a few basic single server setups for various customers, some to single DAT drives, others to large LTO Libraries, but always with reliability of Backup Exec, if not the tape drives.
Move forward a few years...
We're faced with an ever increasing number of servers, multiple sites and the need to backup everything regularly, and in many cases the old "one drive per server" setup just wasn't working anymore. So we built some multi-terabyte Backup Exec Media Servers. Armed with plenty of storage, RAID Arrays and lots of shiny new Backup Exec 10d (d for disk don't you know!) licenses, we set out...
Having looked at all the various promised features, synthetic backups, great support for "Disk Based Backups" (something we really wanted), we figured it would be the wise choice, and, having had no issues with our old v8.6 and v9 installations didn't expect any problem. Yeah sure Symantec had bought Veritas but the veritas name was still there and it was the same product right?
Forward a few months...
Missed and Failed Backups are par for the course, random errors are the norm, and most of the promised features just don't work, or don't work as you'd expect, and some of the most useful features are hindered by completely stupid limitations that render the feature worthless. Oh, and just before you say "It's OK, we'll just do simple backups", don't expect it to be any easier - they don't work either.
Between us we'll post over the next few weeks about some of the biggest problems this product has, keep you up to date with the ongoing hell. If you're considering Backup Exec, don't. Try something else. Backup to 20,000 floppy disks manually copying files. Anything. It will work better.
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