I give up

[webdeck]

Sorry, I've tired to be supportive, but I can't hold back my complaints any longer.

 

I have wasted so many days on trying to get this "upgrade" to work, and I've reached my breaking point - I'm going back to 6.1. I've tried multiple versions of 8.0 and now the latest 8.1 release, and while I can get closer to getting a backup to actually complete successfully, it is still a giant leap backwards from the reliability of 6.1, and reliability is the most important aspect of backup software. Unreliable backups are as bad as no backups, but with a false sense of security.

 

Problems with 8.1:

 

Consistent "Trouble reading files, error -557 (transaction already complete)" when trying to backup Windows XP systems. It scans the entire source, and then throws up this error without backing up a single file. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the Windows client, removing the client from the server and adding it back, and removing the media set and adding it back. No dice - failed over and over again, and the proactive backup just kept retrying, flooding me with failure e-mails until I disabled it. This happens with two different XP clients. One of them managed to backup one time somehow, but not anymore.

 

Client backups, especially Mac clients, are horrendously slow. Significantly slower than with 6.1. I was getting 32MB/min backing up a MacBook Air on wired ethernet - it took over 24 hours to do its initial backup of 20GB, and of course errored out in the end. Even local backups are slower than in 6.1, due to the long snapshot delay between the write and the verification - usually I had a couple errors due to some active files changing between backup and verification, now I have dozens because of the longer time gap. I turned off software compression and MD5, but it's still way too slow. I'm running the server on a 3GHz quad core with plenty of RAM - it's got horsepower to spare.

 

It takes so long to write out a snapshot, another backup will start up and try and run during that time (hey, that's a good idea to make things more efficient.) The only problem was, the new backup would take over the tape library and then everything would eventually get into a confused state and the first backup would be hung thinking its tape was in the drive when it wasn't. The only way to get out of this situation was to kill -9 the engine - it wouldn't stop otherwise. This is with an Exabyte 1x10 StorageLoader (VXA-320) with latest firmware, with an ATTO UL5D SCSI PCIe SCSI card.

 

It takes hours to recreate all of the configurations from 6.1, since nothing was carried over. And then it doesn't support tapes written by 6.1, so I had to swap out all 10 tapes in the library and do full backups (with super slow backups.) Plus, the entire configuration is stored in one binary file that apparently is easily corrupted, forcing you to start all over again creating rules, sources, and media sets for hours on end.

 

And on and on - I just can't be on your QA team any longer, not for a product that I paid for already. So, get back to me when it's stable. I'll just keep running 6.1, running into the "-108 not enough memory error" every few days that forces me to quit and restart it. At least it is reliable other than that nuisance.

 

-Mike