Since Symantec bought Veritas their premier backup software Netbackup has become a big pile of SH!T. Like Norton, they have found a way to pervert it. My favorite support call memory was watching one of my cell mates banging the handset of his phone on his desk it whent like this: He screamed No, some East Indian name! Netbackup!!!!!.... do you know what it is!!!? Bang! Bang! Bang! Put me through to tier 2 RIGHT F@#$ing NOW!!!! No? Slam! as the hand set slams the base.

I almost fell out of my chair laughing so hard.

He was calling about a performance problem with synthetic backups and a VTL in version 6. It turns out that it never worked properly and 10K monkeys with typewriters could backup 2TB faster. He finally got through to someone in North America who admitted that it never worked as billed.

Kinda sounds like using the installer to remove Norton AV but with Veritas you can't uninstall $200K in licenses. I wish Sun would have boughten Veritas instead of Symantec (if they could); at lease they would have killed it without the client misery :_)

Except that I think Veritas should sell off Symentec and we can get our half decent support back.

The amount of times I have to speak to some Far Eastern numpty who can't speak properly or understand what I am saying drives me up the wall.

I used to work on the support teams for Veritas in the pre-symantec days. the old "the customer is always right" mantra, with multilingual, and multi-OS skillls, based in the Reading office in England. good times. sounds like things went pete tong afterwards

...to VCS and have so far been pretty lucky so far as i've not needed support. this gives me a sense of dread!

as for Sun and client misery, have you tried their support lately?

Totally agree - we got nowhere with them understanding that the problem wasn't us, but the software. We've even got a Blog running describing the daily hell, which admittedly, after months of hard work (which was in no way thanks to support at symantec) we've *just* about got it working reliably(ish)*

http://backupexec-hell.blogspot.com/

* [terms, conditions, catches and random acts of "bengine.exe" apply]