I agree, this is a ridiculous feature to have removed. We have multiple jobs that run on the same server over night. The first starts at around 8:30pm and the last starts at 6:00am. So if I exclude a date, that means that I exclude half of the backups that I actually want to run, leaving me vulnerable should a system failure occurr while it waits 24 hours to run the jobs that run of a morning.

I also back emails up to disk, then duplicate to tape. I'd still like the backup to disk to run and be able to skip the duplicate to tape, as there isn't room on the tape for two lots of email backups each night.

I wish I could vote 10 times for this feature to come back!

This is BS. I cannot exclude a specifc date on a particular job!

In my case, I have several jobs... the weekly and incementals, an end of month, and an end of year. The end of month and year write to tape, and the weekly/incremental to disk. For compliance reasons, each job has different media sets for the retention period, i.e. weekly keep for 1 week, monthly keep for 1 year, and yearlys for 10 years. 

So, I cannot exclude the weekly job run on the last day of the month, nor the weekly or end of month at the end of year.

On that last friday, BE now wants to run the: Weekly, End of Month, and End of Year all on the same day!!! BS, I say. 

I just installed BE2012 two days ago and just realized this MAJOR PROBLEM!!!!  I have the same scenario as AdminMan and I can't believe Symantec did this!  Unbelievable!  I'm going to verbally complain to tech support, hoping they can fix this in a service pack!

I have upgrade fron 12.0 to 2012 and missing the exclusion from dates on Job level. The only option that I can find is to eclude days for all the jobs.

Also have I jobs that must run on days during the year.  That was also possible in 12.0.

I WANT THESE OPTIONS BACK!!!   From 12.0 to 2012 is no upgrade but a DOWNGRADE!

Best regards,

Rex

PS.  I thnik I have looked at all options but when so one nows a solution please let me know!!!!

Where does Symantec come up with their ideas?  It sure doesn't seem like they come from their customers.

This is just one of many bad development decisions they have made with this new version, and I haven’t even begun to dig very deep yet.  I’m just not seeing the value of going this direction; we need flexibility in our products. 

I would love an explanation from the Executive in charge of Backup Exec development.  It seems like a waste of development time to code changes like this when they have never addressed the DST time change issue that plagues us all twice a year.

“If it’s not broken, don’t fix it”

Out of the blue, I received a call from an Escalation engineer, in response to a support ticket during the initial installation of the upgrade.  He wanted to know if everything and been resolved and wanted my opinion and comments, positive or negative, about the new software.  I asked him if he had read the forum lately!!

We had a lengthy discussion about many issues and I conveyed my disappointment with how they had changed certain aspects in the operation of the software, particularly, this issue.  He conveyed that they are VERY busy with fixing all the issues that have arisen.

Hopefully, there will be a patch soon! 

The stupidity of leaving this function out is beyond comprehension.  Everytime I turn my head 2012 is forcing me work what I want around the software instead of the software allowing me to customize for my needs.

Seriously this is feeling like dealing with v1.0 of a product that failed to go through any customer regression testing.  I don't know one admin in our environment that does not require exception on certain jobs at certain dates/times.  The more of these threads I come across the more frustrated and serious I am at looking to other software.

I stumbled upon a cached version of KB 179148 (I couldn't get to it directly)  where it states the reason of this was basically because it became possible for a job to become too complex so sometimes a specific job would not run or fail..

"A combination of these different options could be used offering the possibility to define complex schedule. To bring this flexibility, some aspects of schedule periods were based on a schedule window, a period of 24 hours not necessarily starting at 0:00 or finishing at 23:59. This brought undesired side effects where exclusion dates would slide from the day they were defined to the following day or, as another example, for jobs not to run on expected days with a "missed" completion status."

... so basically, rather than fixing the bug, they removed exclusions and even specific day selection (i.e. now you can only do daily, not Mon - Fri, skip Sat/Sun) within a job, but force you to set on the media

"- Provision of exclude dates are defined at media server level as opposed to job level. The exclusion period now coincide with the 24 hour duration of the exclusion date."

which basically forces you to have a seperate server for each job if you wish to try to get the old functionality back (set exclude date under Default Job Settings | Exclude dates, which effect all jobs on that server).

This causes way more trouble than the potential of prevention of possibly undesired effects.  We've been using exclusion dates for over 8years on v10, 11 and 12 w/o a problem and to much success in reigning in jobs that overlap that would cause high server load, prolonged jobs, inconvience with the need to physically intervene, etc.

A basic full/inc with a full at one time, because it will take longer and the incr at a different time will cause them both to run on the same day.  Want a monthly diff and a incr daily... now you have to have 2 seperate jobs for the same data where it's possible for the Diff's Full, the Diff itself, the Incr Full and the Incr iteslf will all occur on the same day.  So instead of having a simple Full -> Diff -> Incr and exclude the laters from occuring on the days the priors occur on, you have to work out some complex overlap scenario, using a ton more space and longer backup windows or sacrifice levels of point-in-time recovery.

I Agree the fact that each server has it own job should mean that you should be able to exclude one server from a nights backup. But it does not work like that when you click on a date it excludes the lot. It is not flexible as you may want to not run a backup as the server is being upgraded. The only way to do it is knock the day off the list where as in the older versions you could exclude a date very easily. This version is awful and I can't say I like it at all as it not suitable for a Central Backup Server which backs up many servers. I currently have 17 servers on it and it seems to do weird things like not doing the jobs in the right order. 

I think I prefer to have one job with many servers as it is not so confusing as there is too much. We have Central backup servers and pre 2012 it was easy to schedule and to check for the failures if and when they occurred.  Maybe we should be offered a downgrade to 2010 which would be a upgrade in usability.

This thread was started in March and others I read were started early in the year as well and here we are 6 months later they still havent come up with a way exclude a single job from a day?  I've been with BE since the "250Mb Jumbo" tape drives were the latest and greatest but I've had it with Symantec and what they have done to previously good products. As soon as my next upgrade opportunity comes around I'm finding something else to backup my data as well as a new network anti-virus product. (you don't even want me to go in to what I went through when I upgraded my AV!)

There has been too many bone-headed changes to keep putting up with this BS.

Eddie

That is ridiculous

WE WANT THESE OPTIONS BACK!!!

This feature being excluded is not ok.  Without these features we are seriously considering droping Symantec and finding another solution.  This "upgrade" is a train wreck!  Between the drastic GUI changes, and the removal of features that we rely on, this is the worst release of BU Exec I have ever seen!  I wish I had never "upgraded" when I was contacted by the Symatec representatives.  Fix this or risk losing long time customers!

So it is now December and this problem, that was first raised here in March, is still an issue. That is just fantastic - thank you so much Symantec. I will now need to work on Christmas Day as well as New Year's Day just to ensure that backups work correctly and so I don't rock in after the holidays to 100s of Backup Exec errors in my Inbox. Thank goodness I've only moved one server to Backup Exec 2012. The others are running 2010R3. There is even one still on version 12 - and it does what we want!

2013, the year I find a new backup solution.

I WANT THESE OPTIONS BACK!!!  

So I thought I'd be clever, after all, who wants to work Christmas Day and New Year's Day right, even if it is just checking backups? So as you have to do in Backup Exec 2012, I excluded three whole days, 25th and 26th December and 1st January from the backup calendar. The main backups were set to run Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, the others weren't desperate and could run a day or two late. A small price to pay to enjoy my days off, uninterrupted.

I didn't notice it on the Christmas Eve backup (although I have confirmed it happened there as well), but today I came in to find that New Year Eve's Exchange backup failed - no, sorry, it was cancelled. What? Who did that? Well, I have worked out no one did, Backup Exec did! How you may ask. Well, I have worked out that when you have a backup that starts the night before an "Excluded Date," if that backup doesn't finish until after midnight, Backup Exec 2012 automatically cancels the backup because it is now trying to run on an "Excluded Date." So with 15 minutes left to run on that backup it was cancelled.

So the scenario worked out to be that the Exchange backup to disk that was running, and had been running for an hour and 45 minutes, was cancelled by Backup Exec at midnight, because it was now an "Excluded Date." Yet the duplicate that doesn't start until after the Exchange backup completes, ran fine.

Symantec can't even get their logic consistant!

This has confirmed my New Year's Resolution - new backup software.

I am in same situation. Hope someone will listen and do something about this.

I have the same trouble here with this new bad surprise. !! :(

The 1/1/2013 was exclude because of holidays.

Our daily backup job start every week day at 7pm.

So the job start normally on monday 31/12/2012 7pm,

but the active job was atomatically cancelled at 00:00 on 1/1/2013 !!!

BE2012 is really a Great Great downgrade !!!

I didn't understand why Symantec need to change a good backup software like be2010 to a new very bad one !

If the exclude date is affecting the jobs in Backup Exec 2012,
please Open a Support ticket as the team is working on it.

@ JayB - Don't you think there have been a bunch of tickets already opened due to this problem?

I personally have opened a ticket, but it was immediately closed when the answer was given: "You cannot exclude a single job from a single day, you can only exclude every job from the entire day"

So is there something else we can do besides complaining about the product in a forum where no one is listening? (at least no one who has enough influence to make the changes needed)

Same problem here!!!
Have excluded some dates during the holidays at several customer sites.
ALL JOBS FAILS (canceled at midnight).

@ JayB - you guys cannot realize that this is not a problem with specific environments...THIS IS A "FEATURE"

ONCE AGAIN...please remove all mistakes from 2012, as this getting more and more serious.................

I agree completely.  Bring back the individual job exclusion date option.  PLEASE!!!!!!!

I nedd individual exclusion days for each job. I need furthermore a priority of jobs, namely that the weekly job at last workday of the week is done prior to the dayly job, when the lastr workday of the week ist for example on thursday. The same hat to be when the last workday of the month covers a dayly job or a weekly job.

I agree completely. I also need the individual job exclusion date option.

I agree, we need this option. Specifically if a business wants to make quarterly backups that are different from full weekend backup. I have also read it maybe in 2012 R2 that sin Beta,

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/how...

Hopefully it comes out soon.