[rescue] OT: Looking for an old version of Veritas Backup Exec

[Dan Sikorski]

On 1/26/2011 9:31 AM, Mr Ian Primus wrote:
>
> Honestly, before seeing this, I'd not messed with Windows backup programs.
Now I'm glad I don't. The version of Veritas Backup Exec that I found (version
10, too new), has the most brain-dead interface I can imagine. Furthermore, it
relies heavily on "media sets" and all kinds of info about what
tapes/files/disks are available, and there is no method to "read this backup
tape and restore it" unless you've already got all the metadata for all your
backups already loaded. To do a restore, you have to select files from the
internal list, and select a media that it already knows about. This basically
means that there is no way to recover from a disk failure, since, even if you
did have all your data backed up in the proper format for this program, there
is no way to restore it, since the clean install you just did on the new hard
drive knows nothing about your backup sets, or what files it's looking for.
I'm sure there has to be some method to do it, but
>   still. It seems really, really back-assward.
>

I've used Backup Exec for many years, from version 7 to 2010R2, which is
the latest.  I'm not going to say it's perfect, but it's not as broken
as you think it is.

When the media is loaded, you should be able to run inventory and/or
catalog jobs on it to get the metadata in backup exec and then be able
to restore.  Off the top of my head, i don't recall the process exactly
because it's not something i do every day.  Also, in my experience,
Backup Exec does a pretty good job with backward compatibility, so i
would think that as long as the version you are using to restore is not
substantially older than what was used to make the backups, you should
be fine.

     -Dan Sikorski