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> And speaking of hating software, let me count the ways I hate all backup > software ... (that said, I have at least one, usually two, and in critical Oh, goodness. At work we use VERITAS BackupExec for backing up. I don't like it from a preference standpoint, but not until recently have I had occasion to hate it with the bile of a thousand, uh, things with lots of bile. It is attached to an Exabyte VXA-2 1U tape loader. Great device: instead of swapping tapes every night, it keeps 10 tapes in it and swaps them itself. Every now and then the drive needs to be cleaned. The drive reports, "Hey, I'm dirty! I need to be cleaned." One of its 10 slots is set aside to automagically clean itself, so it cleans itself. But now BackupExec has it in its head that it needs to clean the drive, which it does. So now the drive has been cleaned twice, using the cleaning tapes twice as fast. That one's my fault: misconfigured. Have auto-clean on for one or the other, but not both. But after doing this, the software decides, out of nowhere, "Hey, tape #1 is a cleaning tape!" The library doesn't report this (I've checked). The software hasn't seen that the cleaning tape has moved. It decides that one of the COMPLETELY UNRELATED bar codes identify a cleaning tape. When I notice this, and tell BE, "Hey, look again" it recognises the tape as a brand new tape, and calls it blank. So the data on there is gone. Not because the tape has melted, or is too old, has been stepped or, or eaten by one of the techs. Because the software deletes the catalogue for it. When that bar code is re-identified. Worse yet, it may take days to notice this (since it doesn't notify anybody, return an error, etc), so eventually all but two or three tapes are identified as cleaning media, and they are quickly filled. So instead of having five working days of backups on this library, I have one. > cases 3-4 backups of all my data these days :-). Yes, fortunately this is not our only backup system. But that makes it no more enjoyable.There's stuff above here
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