Backup Exec 11D

jcblester

I am looking for books on Backup Exec 11d. We recently lost an employee and, of course, he was the one who went to the Backup Exec training. Is there any training material available w/o taking a Backup Exec class?

astorrs

I would read through the admin guide and purchase a subscription to the Symantec Backup Exec Tech Center @ $249/yr to supplement what you get from the guide.

http://techcenter.symantec.com/ecampus/enterprise?siteName=sena&courseNo=DP6000&trackid=ecampus

The other options would be either the Virtual Academy (no travel required) training class on BEWS11 or 12, but that's still about $3500. Or the CD-ROM based eLearning course for BEWS10 which you might still be able to find.

blargoe

+1. That should be sufficient for Backup Exec. You might be able to get what you need solely from the Admin guide.

RTmarc

What exactly are you trying to do? Just learn the product or a specific task? I'm going to be completely honest, Backup Exec (11d and 12.0) is a fairly intuitive program. You'll learn more by walking through the Wizards and reading the descriptions than any manual. Just my two cents.

jcblester

RTmarc,

So far that is what I have been doing; just feeling my wat through the software. I am surprised at how easy some of it is, but I just wanted to read up on it a bit to see what some of the processes are. For example, I need to start backing up the DC System State. It may be very easy to do and I am sure I will find out, but I just like to read up a bit before I actually go in and try to do some stuff. I have always been able to find books for everything and you just can't find anything out there for this software. It looks like everything I needed has been under my nose the whole time, as usual! Thanks for the advice!

HeroPsycho

Read the admin guide, the other people are right. It has so much info in it, that might be it.

FYI, to backup System State in a DC or any other machine, just open selections of the Backup Job, and browse the DC node you want to backup, and you'll see System State listed right there. Very easy!

blargoe

By the way, the add-on Active Directory agent for Backup Exec rocks, if you have it. You can get so granular with it. Once, I restored from backup only a single attribute of a single user account from tape (I think it was a job title or something like that).

Probably it is the most intuitive backup software I've used as long as you're not backing up like 100 servers and need to have more general policy-driven backups.

hypnotoad

Just dig in to it.

I've figured out that the tape library has some issues, and sometimes BE just suddenly makes all your tapes cleaning tapes. I've figured out that sometimes when you schedule a job, you don't really want it to run. And sometimes, liveupdate will just simply not work. And don't try to put 6 tapes in to your tape library at once -- BE will crash after it inventory's number 4.

You won't get great experiences like this from the manual!

I would still LOVE to know how to tell the agent to use the LAN NIC for backing up instead of the DMZ NIC so my backups of this one server would actually run in less than 400 hours.

astorrs

nl wrote:

I would still LOVE to know how to tell the agent to use the LAN NIC for backing up instead of the DMZ NIC so my backups of this one server would actually run in less than 400 hours.

Have you specified the backup network on the Backup Exec server? By default it is set to use any interface it can (if it can reach the server via the DMZ NIC on the server it may end up taking that path. If you force the adapter the BEWS server will use for all backups you can "encourage" the agent to do the same (it will use a NIC on the same network if possible). In the jobs you can also tell it to allow it to use a different network if the default isn't available on that server, make sure that is not selected in this case.

To specify the backup network, on the BEWS server goto Tools -> Options -> Network & Firewall -> Default network interface

Give it a try and let us know if it fixes it or not.

HeroPsycho

blargoe wrote:

By the way, the add-on Active Directory agent for Backup Exec rocks, if you have it. You can get so granular with it. Once, I restored from backup only a single attribute of a single user account from tape (I think it was a job title or something like that).

Probably it is the most intuitive backup software I've used as long as you're not backing up like 100 servers and need to have more general policy-driven backups.

If you like that one, check out the granular restore features for Exchange. Restore like you made a brick level backup with normal backups of Exchange. Can restore individual mailboxes, folders, mailbox items. Freakin' awesome!

cbigbrick

Symantec was a wonderful download site for all of their manuals

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/downloads.jsp?pid=15047

I read the Backup Exec 9.X back in 2002 and learned everything I needed. It’s one of the best manuals I have every read. I’m half was though the 12.X manual right now. Things have changed in the newer version but for the better.

Backups will either make you a hero or a zero……strive to be a hero. Looks great on the resume too!!!

hypnotoad

astorrs wrote:

nl wrote:

I would still LOVE to know how to tell the agent to use the LAN NIC for backing up instead of the DMZ NIC so my backups of this one server would actually run in less than 400 hours.

Have you specified the backup network on the Backup Exec server? By default it is set to use any interface it can (if it can reach the server via the DMZ NIC on the server it may end up taking that path. If you force the adapter the BEWS server will use for all backups you can "encourage" the agent to do the same (it will use a NIC on the same network if possible). In the jobs you can also tell it to allow it to use a different network if the default isn't available on that server, make sure that is not selected in this case.

To specify the backup network, on the BEWS server goto Tools -> Options -> Network & Firewall -> Default network interface

Give it a try and let us know if it fixes it or not.

Actually I did this and tried running a backup last week and it worked great. Then I let it run Friday's job and checked it today (Monday) and apparently it's back to it's old shanangans. NTBackup doesn't have this problem, neither does just copying the files.

I hate BE.