Hit upgrade on Symantec Backup Exec, and unleash Hell Backup Exec 2012 users are screaming in frustration over the "improvements" pushed out this year. Users were chatting on the Symantec Connect forum about the redesign, saying that it's more like a trip to the dentist after all. Here are just a few of the 228 comments on the forum: Bulbous: "Menus are now hidden behind other …
er, windows admins?
Ducks, runs.
Ok, small companies who don't really run pre-prod and anyone who has been told that the software has been bought and they must go away and install it to replace some really old software.
I'm not saying they should, just that it happens. Some admins are paid to deal with the grief.
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I have very fond memories of Partition Magic - written by a bunch of geniuses and which could do things with disk partitions that no one else can do even today. Then Symantec bought out PowerQuest and killed it in 2003 - never even wrapping its functionality into any of their other products. And the reason they bought PowerQuest, if memory serves, was to take the other product - Drive Image, out of the stores because it was cutting into Symantec's Norton Ghost bottom line. 10 years later and Ghost still doesn't work as easily as Drive Image!
Try Tom Ehlert's Drive Snapshot, great little imaging program with an incredibly easy GUI, works natively over networks, reasonably cheap, and licensing terms that are either lenient or vague enough that you only need a license for every running instance, not every computer you ever use it on like Symantec - which makes it affordable for IT people to image new computers.
Is `doublespeak` for the bullshit from the marketing weasels.
Hey Reg, can we get a bullshit icon?????
This one comes to mind:
http://www.mormongags.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/node-gallery-display/bullshit2.JPG
Actually, it's corporate defence speak for "oh dear, we've really cocked it up but we don't want to spend the time and money it would take to correct the mistake we made so if we keep chanting 'it's all for the greater good', perhaps the punters will believe us".
It's all for the greater good, the greater good, the greater good, the greater good...
BE has been post-pension age horrible for years (especially if you have the audacity to want to recover anything more complex than single files), If you're a mostly MS house, seriously, give DPM a whirl. Odd at first but it is a much much better product from this millenium, and especially good if you use HyperV.
I am a backup specialist, working on all off-mainframe OSes. I've been working in storage/backup for about 14 years and have dealt with most major backup packages in very large companies. I have to say that DPM is an absolutely superb piece of software, I was really surprised when I evaluated it.
I wouldn't advise anyone to actually use it - save for 100% MS shops, who will never go non-MS - but it is really good. MS have nailed both the UI and the CLI, Symantec should be very worried as it's targeted squarely at BEX. Still it can only backup Windows so, BEX is pretty much the only backup package that it will take on, I know that BEX can backup non-Windows systems, but it doesn't really, not very often.
"Ironically, the DPM UI uses a server centric view which is the cause of so much frustration in BE 2012.:
Err, no it hasn't. It has a Protection Group centric UI. Protection groups are logically based around backup schedules and targets, not the servers being backed up.
I wonder if it's intentnional? I mean given that Symantec Enterprise Protection (SEPA) product's transition from v11 to v12 actually did more damage than most of the viruses it was to supposedly protect you from? Or the fact that it would randomly lock remote users out of VPN sessions. My personal favorite is when we were able to consistently replicate these problems to their technical support, only to be told "It's not our upgrade that's the problem, it's because Cisco hasn't updated their code to reflect our changes".
Here's where it gets funny, after months of denying any problems, they quietly release a patch that magically fixes all of our problems. Wonder if that's how they're going to address all the bitching and anger from the Backup Exec customer community?
But, to the individual who commented on the similarities between CA and Symantec: Brilliant, however at this point it's down to arguing which is worse, a kick to the balls from the front or from behind, by someone wearing steel toed boots.
The bulk of the UI and management really had not changed that much all the way from my first experiences as Seagate Backup Exec, through to Veritas Backup Exec, and right up to Symantec's 12.5 version... Little bits and pieces changed but with each new implementation of the UI, the basic layout was retained...
The 2010 version suddenly gained a new "dashboard" like view, whilst keeping the old views around. In hindsight (wonderful thing) this was a hint of changes to come.
During the 2012 installation/upgrade, the messages on screen (if you don't just go Next Next Next Next) do clearly talk about a new user experience and a new backup paradigm, AND though I didn't try it, it did offer a "rollback" option as well.
Yes the UI is radically different, and yes it is odd having distinct backup jobs for each server, and yes sometimes the migration sometimes does "odd" things if you have backup jobs that have been endlessly tweaked or have "bizarre" configurations (might have explained some long standing oddness), in my case ending up with one backup job called "Incremental Incremental Full", but in the long term I think I will grow to like the UI... Right now I'm still adjusting, having performed my upgrade yesterday and got my first test backup running about the time this article was posted.
Beware the warnings! They are there for your benefit!
I did. It was symantec support that said i had to upgrade to the latest version to get over some errors I was having. I just blindly followed their support.
Now im having even more problems. And even though I pay for enterprise support I really struggle to understand their indian support.
So if anyone here can answer this simple question I would be grateful:
In 2010 if i had a job that was erroring that "The requested source duplicate backup sets catalog record could not be found. Perhaps the media containing the source backup sets was previously deleted. " I would just delete the backup jobs, and recreate them from policy and it would work next run. I have no idea how to fix this in the new one and have had a backup duplicate to tape job thats not run in months :(
This article posts some great feedback from users on Symantec’s own forum. I have to say, from what I’ve seen of the product so far I have to agree with every word except the one that claims there was no warning that 2012 was a major overhaul of the entire program.
I thought that was actually pretty clear in the documentation that I read. I just didn’t realize quite how far into the depths of the program it extended. As it turns out, changes extend into pretty much every facet of the program.
To hear the actual horror stories of people who had backup jobs that encompassed 35 servers get split into 35 individual jobs, it brings a certain reality to the whole thing. Here we would have the same problem but because I have tested it we’re now evaluating other options. Sticking with Symantec may still be the best course but we may need to upgrade to Net Backup, which I think is Symantec’s intention. I think they’re trying to push larger organizations away from Backup Exec and towards their more expensive enterprise product, Net Backup.
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