Making it work: Tip #1

As this Backup Exec system has given us so much hell, we've learned a few things you won't find in the manual, so as we think of them, we'll make a note of them for you in case you stumble across this page determined to find fixes to your Backup Exec issues.

My first top tip is this - if you find your server regularly ends up in a 100% CPU used status, not long after jobs should have been submitted to the queue via your policy, the chances are you've come across "incapability bug #1" - it seems Backup Exec can't handle having LOTS of jobs submitted at once - despite this being impossible to control if you create a policy for a group of servers which is recommended. So split your jobs into lots of smaller policies starting them a few minutes apart from each other (we did it 15 mins apart but you can go closer from experiements tried here) (no more than 20 jobs/selection lists per policy). Result, "bengine" stops sitting there at 100% CPU and causing the dreaded "server paused" fault.

It's just past 7...

...and the first batch of Backups have appeared for the evening - since I made some changes last week to split the jobs into even more policies to reduce the chance that "Backup Exec Job Engine" or "Ben-Gin" as we call it will stall, it does seem to cope a little better, although so far this hasn't translated into the system running correctly, it has stopped it failing quite so often around job submission time.

Of course the whole point of policies is defeated by having to create lots of identical policies with slightly different start times (since now any change means changing them all...)... but we'll let that slide. Anything to get Backups to run even once a week would be nice!