back to article Security stock slinger Symantec speeds up with latest Backup Exec

Symantec has announced the latest version of its Backup Exec software, with a newer product that's apparently "up to 100 per cent" quicker than its "challenging" older brother. The last major release was Backup Exec 2012 back in ... 2012. It was a controversial release, with many new and changed features and it has taken over …

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  1. Mad Chaz

    100% performance improvement is not pretty dramatic, it's a lie. Unless they somehow managed to take backup jobs and run them in 0 seconds flat.

    Why?

    Say a job takes 2 hours to run.

    Improve that 100%, you reduse by 2 hours. So the job took 0 seconds to run. Same for backup jobs that took 10 seconds or 3 days.

    Gota love mathematically illiterate marketing bods.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      That would depend on the metric they are using for performance, say they used the MB/min that they have in the interface, a backup runs at 500MB/m, 100% performance improvement would push that to 1000MB/m.

      But god, why does backup exec hate me so much.

      1. Mad Chaz

        True, but that would require the article actually telling up what the metric is. As it does not, the stated improvement of 100% meaningless.

    2. Camilla Smythe
      Childcatcher

      ODFO

      At least Symantec are not McAfee plus they gave us [s]GreenNet[/s] StalkStalk. What's not to like unless you are not thinking of the children?.. Are you not thinking of the children?

      Anyway. YTF is Mellor putting SpamVertising on the pages of El Reg. Can someone sensible like Orlowsky take him outside and Cattle Prod him?

    3. Nightkiller

      Your problem is not mathematics, its statistics.

  2. Tim99 Silver badge

    Fast?

    > /dev/null

    Recovery is something else.

    1. Crazy Operations Guy
      Joke

      Re: Fast?

      Recovery is easy:

      < /dev/random

      It'll probably give you better results than Backup Exec normally gives you.

      1. Vince

        Re: Fast?

        What he said! Backup Exec is a steaming pile of arse.

        See also:

        http://backupexec-hell.blogspot.co.uk/

        ...older posts are Backup Exec before we switched to DPM (where our backups have worked ever since - and importantly our restores too!)

      2. WraithCadmus
        Joke

        Re: Fast?

        @Crazy Operations Guy

        If you use this 1337 trick instead you can get even FASTER restore

        < /dev/urandom

        1. Crazy Operations Guy

          Re: "< /dev/urandom"

          I could use urandom, but then how am I going to get my customers to buy R2?

  3. unredeemed

    Odds are they are using deduplication to achieve this, maybe even borrowing from NBU with their Accelerator technology. So the speed improvements of 100% are not unreasonable, but at the same time, this is in certain datasets with low change rates of a certain data type.. So really, it applies to no one but their own labs.

    So many people have suffered with BE 12, 12.5, 2010, R1, R2, R3, 2012, etc... That not many people left have that much faith in Symantec, let alone BackupExec anymore.

    It's always been an SMB product, and has always been artificially crippled so as to not step on the toes of NetBackup. Only time will tell. Odds are, based on past performance of their products, you wont get anything stable and working till at least R2 of the release. So let's see an update to this article in 2016...

    1. Roger Greenwood

      "It's always been an SMB product"

      In which case surely the three most important attributes are reliability, reliability and reliability. Speed not so.

      I dumped it 2 years ago. No regrets.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I hate BE2012 - but surely the real question is...

    have they finally fixed the GMT / BST time change that causes backup jobs to fail?

    1. phuzz Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: I hate BE2012 - but surely the real question is...

      It's been a few years since I last had to deal with BE, and I'd forgotten that 'feature'. Thanks for reminding me :/

  5. Gartal

    Backup Exec.......

    Like so many Executives, overpaid and underperforming. Not just that but abstruse, obtuse and of no use.

    I have hated BE for...... must be going on for twenty years. It has always been a POS. Cumbersome, Clunky and difficult to use and manage. It comes in a close second for the worst commercial software ever written.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Upgraded my own install to BE2014. The job which took 2 hours in BE2012, has been running for 18 hours now, and is still not complete. BE2014 is 100% faster? More like 1000% slower to me.

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