Hay Ryan, What about using a CASO? This will allow you to use one instance of backup exec and then you'll see all the jobs, all the logs, all the media libraries and everything else in the one application. I also used a client to then connect to that CASO remotely so I didn't need to remote onto the server. I'm done with backup exec now fortunately. We've moved onto an enterprise level product called Data protector. It's almost even more inaccessible and instead of donig everything in one application, you've applications for the SAN, the EML, the VLS and then you've also a back end console for the data protecter UI as well because not all the functionality is available in the GUI. Fun times. Even funnier because I no longer have to do it full time. Shout if you have any questions I can help with. Regards Darragh Ó Héiligh Fujitsu Offices of the Houses of the Oireachtas, Fredrick Building, South Fredrick Street, Dublin2 Telephone: +353 (1) 618 3559 Email: darragh.oheiligh@oireachtas.ie Internet: http://www.oireachtas.ie From: Ryan Shugart <rshugart@pcisys.net> To: Blind sysadmins list <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> Date: 16/06/2010 00:32 Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] let's talk Backup Exec Sent by: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org Hey everyone: I just got a promotion at work, and with the goodness of a promotion comes more responsibilities. I'm now in charge of our backup infrastructure. We run Backup Exec 12.5, and have 16 or so media servers in various branch offices around the world. While Backup Exec used to be very accessible, over the last two versions accessibility seems to have gone into something of a decline, I already use scripts just to read the main table of jobs, and might need more just to get around the scheduling window so I can actually schedule a job. I'd consider the rest of the program accessible but clunky, tabbing doesn't always bring you where you think it will, on some screens tab order seems to be dynamic. Backup Exec also has an odd way of bringing up alert windows and grabbing your focus, even when you tell it specifically not to. While clunkyness is OK on one server, when you have fifteen individual servers to manage and no way to do it in a centralized fashion clunkyness is less acceptable. This is also less than a quarter of my new responsibilities as well. The current admin has the remote desktop console setup with all the Backup Exec servers in his favorites, stays logged into each server with a Backup Exec window open, and flicks from screen to screen and can easily glance at the output from each job. For us screen reader users, that doesn't work well. I've already got e-mail alerts set up and am using some Outlook rules to sort failure jobs out from successes, but was wondering if there's anything else I can be doing? I'd think people in really large environments with hundreds of media servers aren't logging into each server on a daily basis, so there has to be better ways to handle this. Any ideas? Thanks. Ryan _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-sysadmins