The Nightmare that they call Symantec Backup Exec

On one of my previous projects, I worked with a guy that was in charge of backups. He used Backup Exec with tapes. Smooth as can be, no headaches (or so it seemed to me). A client comes to ask me about backing up there data. First thing that I thought of was, Backup Exec. That was almost 3 years ago and to this day it works some times and other times it doesn't. No rhyme or reason. Numerous calls to Symantec and getting no where, I finally gave up. I decided to look at it again today, and so far, it looks like I may have fixed it.

I was getting error such as: E000810C, E000FE36, and others that I don't remember.

I googled something and it suggested changing that account password. I decided I was going to create a new user account and just start from scratch.

I found this article.

How to change the user name or password of the Backup Exec Services Account in Backup Exec.

So I did that and it broke some things.  So I kept looking.  I found this.

Requirements for the Backup Exec Service Account (BESA)

It had some interesting things that I have never seen before or have been told by symantec. They were:

The Backup Exec Service Account (BESA) requires the following User Rights in group policy and group memberships:

• User rights requirements: 
• Act as a part of Operating System ( Only for Windows Server 2000 ).
• Create a token object.
• Log on as a service. 
• Logon as a batch job. 
• Manage auditing and security log. 
• Backup files and directories. 
• Restore files and directories.
  
• Group Memberships or equivalent access: 
• Domain Admins or Administrators.
• Backup Operators. 

Due to security implementations in Microsoft Small Business Server, the service account must be " DomainName\Administrator " account.


Refreshes local and Active Directory-based Group Policy settings, including security settings by executing "gpupdate" command. 

I ran the "Test  Run" option on the job and it ran with no errors and actually completed in a crazy fast amount of time (25 and 36 seconds).  I guess the true test will be if this completes the full backup job scheduled to run in two days.  I don't think I have ever had a full backup work unless I started it and deleted all the previous saved data.  I don't have my hopes up but we'll see.

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