Tech support reps will often try to put you off by claiming your problem can't be real because no one else has reported it. But what if other customers have been trying to complain and turned away with the same response? That's the struggle one reader feels he had to overcome in a situation with Veritas support.
"I have used Veritas 8.5, 9.1, and 10.0 successfully with no problems for over four years ... until now," the reader wrote. "I recently upgraded from Backup Exec 9.1 to 10.0 at two different sites. I soon discovered that Backup Exec 10.0 won't show me the contents of backups made of some of my larger drives under versions 8.5 or 9.1 at either site -- it instead shows me partial restore selections for another drive, sometimes not even a drive on that server. The symptoms are identical at each site, and occur on each of the archives I've made for the past few years for those drives. The drives in question have over 250 gigs of data and tens of millions of files. This is apparently an overflow condition. I am also in a unique position because at one of my sites I installed a new server right before upgrading to 10.0, and I still have the old 9.1 server. The files that store the contents of the backups are called catalog files. I can take working catalog files from the old 9.1 server, copy them to the new 10.0 server, and watch them fail. This is a smoking gun, and I was sure Veritas would quickly address the problem since I could prove so easily that the problem was with 10.0."
The reader optimistically opened the support incident with Veritas back in May. "At first Backup Exec tech support insisted that all of my backups for the past four years were obviously bad since no one else reported the problem," the reader wrote. "This is not true, as I have been able to restore at will for using Backup Exec 8.5 and 9.1 with these drives. I tried to get them to look at my catalog files for days before they finally agreed to. They also insisted that I attempt to re-catalog (re-read) my old backup tapes with 10.0 software on my DLT autoloader to be sure the tapes are ok. I attempted this a few times, only to have it fail each time. The backups of these drives take 24 hours to complete, and the catalogs would apparently take even longer as well if they would ever complete. While I'm doing all this debugging for them, I can't take backups of my servers, which is what all this hardware and software is supposed to be doing. It appears their new 10.0 software also won't catalog my old tapes, and it won't read the stored catalog files that tell Backup Exec what's on the tapes, so between these two failures I can't restore anything from my old backups. Not a good position to be in."
After many weeks and many calls, the reader finally got Backup exec tech support to agree that not being able to catalog the tapes was a separate issue. "After numerous gatekeepers within their support organization stonewalled me for weeks, they finally looked at my data. They agreed there was a problem with their 10.0 software -- and not with my data or backup tapes -- and said engineering would look at it to try to fix it. They also admitted that 10.0 changed how Backup Exec works with 9.1 and older catalogs, so I am inferring that they broke something."
But if reader thought his problems were over once both issues were referred to engineering, he was mistaken. "Today I got an e-mail from support indicating that different engineering teams at Veritas work on the two different problems I am having," he wrote after he was a month into the process. "They refuse to even try to find and fix the problem until I do more troubleshooting so that they wouldn't have to waste their time. I was frankly shocked at this level of arrogance -- they stated, in so many words, that their time was much more important than mine and I would have to do their work for them. I have already spent dozens of hours working these problems, explaining the problem over and over to different people at Veritas. Meanwhile, who knows how many people continue to upgrade to Backup Exec 10.0 not knowing that may not be able to restore their old data. Perhaps they could use this in a new marketing campaign: 'Backup Exec 10.0 - works fine on small drives'."
The reader soon left on vacation without a resolution, having to take up the fight again when he returned a month later. "After sending them my tapes and dealing with even more gatekeepers within the Veritas tech support organization, it looks like they are finally taking the problem seriously," the reader wrote recently. "There will hopefully be a hotfix release within a few weeks that will solve this and related issues. And they have acknowledged that at least one other party reported the same trouble I was having. I can only imagine how many others just weren't stubborn enough to the issue addressed and escalated."
Write Ed Foster with your comments about this story or your own girpes at Foster@gripe2ed.com.
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