Daniel Nashed's Blog

Symantec Backup Exec End of Life

I have been helping a customer who had issues with Backup Exec for Domino.
They got issues with their backups. The error message pointed to issues with their tapes.
But it turned out it had to do with the DAOS integration which is not fully working with Domino 9.0.1

The error they got pointed to issues with the back media:

Final Error Code: e00084ca HEX (0xe00084ca HEX) or a00084cd HEX (0xa00084cd HEX)
Final Error Description:  The data being read from the media is inconsistent.
Final Error Category:  Backup Media Errors

But it turned out that the backup had issues with querying the DAOS files for databases


After a long discussion with support we turned off the daosmgr commands which are used during the backup of a database (registry settings). But you cannot separate DAOS NLO backup and NSF backup.

There is no way to completely separate NSF and DAOS backup. It was a surprise that Backup Exec has so "deep" DAOS integration but I think they did not implement it the right way.
Running a daosmgr LISTNLOs for each database during backup does not sound right to me.

There is a setting described here -> https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.TECH136835 to disable querying information for the backup and the customer is now doing that operation manually at restore.

They set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Symantec\Backup Exec For Windows\Backup Exec\Engine\Domino\DAOS listnlo mode = 3 and the issues have stopped.

Speaking with during the long going support incident Symantec they finally said that Domino 9.0.1 is not supported and they are declaring end of life for their product and even the customer has valid maintenance they are not getting any updates.
So they have been working on it for a while and had no support for 9.0.1 and finally decided to declare the product end of life instead of fixing issues and supporting 9.0.1!!!

They closed the support incident and the customer asked for a formal statement from product support in writing.

If you are using Backup Exec it sounds like it is time to look for a different backup solution!
I saw multiple customer reports with similar issues and they are all not getting any help.
If someone else is using Backup Exec you should be aware of the situation.

It is not only the current problem but also the way they did not care about the customer problem and that they have vaild support contract and they are not supporting their product on a current Domino release.

Now that Symantec and Veritas are separate companies we have to see what is going to happen (https://www.symantec.com/page.jsp?id=separation-strategy) .
My customer has valid maintenance for their product but Veritas does now own the product.

Not sure if the developers are still on board on either side. But in any case they decided to not support it any more.

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