You know, I like the fact that technology is always moving forward (in most cases) and I consider myself to be a pretty adaptive guy. But this Backup Exec 2012 garbage has got to be one of the worst experiences I've ever had with an upgrade... EVER! And we're not a huge corporation or something that can afford a test environment. Everything is done live here.
First I read the pre-upgrade documentation. Okay, it says right their in black and white that there are significant structure changes between 2010 and 2012. Fine. I can deal with that as long as they make sense and eventually benefit me in some way.
Not the case at all, here.
After the upgrade everything looks good so far. I see my deduplication folder, my backup-to-disk folder, my VTL, and my tape loader. Then I start looking at the jobs that it automatically migrated for me. It takes the nice neat schedules I had created with backup policies, templates, and selection lists and explodes them into a million pieces across the UI. Apparently, selection lists are a thing of the past. So this means, unless I have the data for my "data backups" located in the exact same place on every machine, I have to create, modify, or delete an individual job for every machine individually. What a pain in the ass! And it became such a mess that, after trying to make sense of it for about an hour and a half, I decided to delete them all and re-create my schedules according to their new methods.
Fast forward three hours...
Well, I got my data backups all set up again (one machine at a time, mind you). At least re-creating my DR backup is pretty straight forward - I can create a group, add my servers, then when I first create a new job I can select the entire machine's resources and move right along. But what if I need to exclude something from them once I've created that group of jobs? No way! Can't edit the selections on multiple machines, you have to do it one at a time!
Okay, so now my backups are all re-created. And they look nice and neat this time. Fast forward to the next day...
I get to work and check my email first thing in the morning and what do I see... twenty thousand emails (not literally, but you get the idea) from Backup Exec! Why? Because, since we've done away with our beloved policies, templates, and selection lists, now we get a separate notification for every machine that has something being backed up on it. They are all individual jobs now, remember?
Okay, whatever. I guess I can deal with this. Just another adjustment to make, right? Well, I had originally included the other person in my department on the notification lists. Since I'm pretty much in charge of the backups I figured she doesn't really want her inbox flooded with all these messages every day so I'll just remove her from the notifications lists. Easy enough, right? Sure, we can just click on our server group, choose "Edit backups", then edit any settings the jobs have in common. Wrong! True, we can select our server group, and we can edit most settings they have in common, but apparently that doesn't necessarily mean the settings will actually change on those jobs - because they don't! So, here we go, one at a time editing the backup jobs.
After all that, I've gotta be done with this. Things are bound to run smoothly now. And so they do... for a couple days, anyway. Then I notice that my retention periods on my media are all inconsistent even though I had set them correctly when I created a bulk job for DR. Same rule applies here as with the notification list. One at a time.
So I get them all done and decide that I had better go back in and double-check things because I don't want my full backups overwriting themselves each week or my incrementals and differentials overwriting themselves each night and what not. So I double-click on the first server in my list and what happens? I get an error dialogue. "The query for JobView failed".
Great, just when I thought it couldn't get any worse. I click through the dialogue and the UI crashes. That can't be good. I launch the admin console again and double-click on the next server in line. Same thing. Lovely, so now I can't edit any of my jobs! Off to the KB I go.
So this is a reported bug in the program. Fine, they all have one somewhere and the details are kinda sketchy so it's hard to tell just how many users it would actually affect (I find I'm kinda unique that way - the laws of probability, physics, and nature follow directly behind Murphy's Law). I open a case with tech support. A few hours later I get a guy on the phone. You all know how this goes... the first guy reads from a script and makes you do all the stuff you already did before you called the first time, then escalates the issue.
A few days later I get another guy on the phone. Nice enough guy, but I don't really like what he has to say. He tells me, yeah, it's a known issue and there is a patch to prevent it from occurring, but nothing to help the ones already affected by it. Yeah, that's me! So, instead of waiting two, three, four, twelve weeks for that patch I tell him just blow out the database and I'll reconfigure everything. I've got plenty of experience with it at this point I should be able to get it done in about six hours. So we start with a fresh database, bring the server up, and off I go. All my devices are showing up fine, I fly through it and set up my jobs again and everything is back to "normal".
But, then my backups don't run over night. WTF!? I go to the admin console and see that all my storage devices are offline. Again, WTF!? I check the physical devices -they're alive. I restart the services and go to the Storage tab and it says "Detecting devices". Okay, I'll wait a minute.
Thirty minutes later, still "Detecting devices". I double-check all the physical devices and, sure enough, they're alive. So now what?
I reboot the Backup Exec server. It comes back online, I check the Storage tab, same thing. OMFG! Off to the KB I go. Guess what, I get to be the victim of known issue #2.
And I typically assume that upgrades are mostly safe to proceed with once the first service pack is issued. That's usually when all the bugs are worked out and the initial feedback addressed. WAY too much confidence I placed in Symantec this time.
So, If anyone is still with me... do you have any suggestions for an alternative backup software? My service contract with Symantec expires in three months and I won't be renewing it.