The order of operation

The clients I did some work for a couple of weeks ago called me this past Thursday. They had purchased a 250 GB external hard drive (USB2) and they wanted to save the server backups to it. Symantec Backup Exec supports saving to external hard drives so I thought it would be a pretty simple task. Well, it kind of was….

After setting the external hard drive up in Backup Exec, I created a second backup job. The new backup job was set up almost exactly the same as the job that backs up to tape (full nightly backups). I tried testing the new backup job and it failed. I looked through the error log and noticed that it was showing zero available space on the media. Weird, considering that it was a newly formatted drive and I made sure that the size was set up correctly in the Backup Exec device manager. I tried changing a couple of settings on the device but nothing worked. Finally, after complete frustration was setting in, I searched the Backup Exec forums.

It seems that Backup Exec has a funny little issue with testing a job that has never ran before. According to one of their FAQ entries, I needed to run the job before I could test it. That’s right, run the job first before it could test if the job would run. I changed the settings so that only a couple of small files would be backed up and it ran successfully. I then changed the settings back so that everything would be backed up and ran a test run. That test run now succeeded.

Maybe one day Symantec will fix it so that you can test jobs first. That would make a little more sense.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place. ~Henry Louis Mencken

07.Apr.08 Software

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3 Responses to “The order of operation”

Rollie | April 8th, 2008 at 2:28 am
So you mean they actually monitored whether the backups were working and contacted you when they didn’t? I need clients like that! hehe

I’ve noticed all sorts of wackiness like what you describe ever since Symantec bought up Veritas (and by extension, BackupExec). Actually, pretty much everything Symantec has been hitting the skids in recent years.

Did your clients buy all the extensions to BackupExec like Open File Backup and Network Backup? I think it usually comes with a year of Open File support at least.

The first time I noticed it not backing up open files, I tried to be clever and use a UNC link to backup instead of a drive (i.e. \\localhost\c$ instead of C:\) so that Shadow Copy would be invoked and then I could grab the open files… but then I found you had to but the network package even for that.
wyckedone | April 8th, 2008 at 8:52 am
They didn’t see the failed test runs on the external drive. I was able to fix it before they did the “Hey, how’s it going?” pop-in. They did see the failed jobs on the tape drive, though, because they actually check the backup status every day! I went back and fixed that issue (bad agent settings) pretty quickly.

They did purchase a couple of agents: Advanced Open File and Microsoft SQL Server. Those seem to work pretty well. They also purchased the Intelligent Disaster Recovery option. That option works really well and makes it easy to create a bootable recovery CD.
Kevin | April 21st, 2008 at 3:51 pm
I too have experienced the backup issues. I’m less and less impressed with symantec with each release.