I thought I'd share my experiences installing and configuring Backup Exec 2012. For the past few months I've read nothing but pure hatred for BE 2012, with many of those opinions originating right here on Spiceworks. However, I must say that I am totally surprised - I actually REALLY like BE 2012 and think it's a huge improvement over BE 2010.
First, a little background... we outgrew our single backup server, so we added a second system to the mix with its own dedicated autoloader. The old backup server was running BE 2010 SP2. When we got the new server, I figured I may as well try out 2012 and if I hated it (as I expected I would) I'd just exercise my downgrade rights and install 2010 like the current server.
One other thing I should get out of the way... I'm not a Symantec fan boy by any means. I absolutely despise them as a company (that may be downgraded to "hate" soon, but hey - that's an improvement). I have been burned by them too many times waiting on hold for literally multiple hours just to talk to a support technician... only to not be able to understand them through their thick accents and condescending tones. And, I was overjoyed to finally dump SEP back in 2011 in favor of Sophos. I have been reluctantly using Backup Exec for quite a while, and would have switched for something else had there been a better option out there. But I digress...
Installing BE 2012 was a snap, and once I got over the initial shock of the new user interface and started setting up jobs, I saw the big improvements they'd made. A couple things I really like:
1. I like not having to configure 4 different jobs for every backup like I did in 2010 (the full and differential backups to disk, and their subsequent duplicates to tape). I love the "stages" concept.
2. Actually restoring items is MUCH improved in my opinion. The restore wizard was very intuitive and safe feeling. I wasn't terrified the whole time that I was going to screw something up and overwrite my production SQL database.
3. It's a little thing, but I like the graphical weekly chart that shows the health of my backups.
As stated above, I did this as a clean install, not an upgrade since this was my second BE server. I can see where an in-place upgrade could potentially be a headache. However, I still don't see any huge problems that have caused such an uproar in the community.