Veritas Software Corp. announced NetBackup 6.0 in April 2005 and began shipping it in October, just after Symantec announced that it was buying Veritas.

Users on at least two Web site forums dedicated to Symantec customers said they are hoping that Symantec's Maintenance Pack 4, due out around October, will fix bugs they're finding in NetBackup 6.0. The most recent maintenance pack, No. 3, was made available on June 30.

Bank of Canada, whose job it is to issue money for that country like the Federal Reserve in the U.S., plans on staying at NetBackup Version 5.0 "until it's apparent things with 6.0 have improved," said Paul Keating, an IT manager at the bank, which is based in Ottawa.

Problems cited by other users include issues with the vault service, which automates tape rotation; the scheduler, which lets users specify the times that backups are run; and the Job Manager service, which accepts backup jobs and then runs them. When these features don't work, automated backups can't be performed and aren't saving the data properly when they do, users said.

"The vault service won't start," said Steve Bally, systems engineer for RadiSys Corp., a Hillsboro, Ore., engineering company that has been using NetBackup for a number of years. Without the vaulting service, Bally said, he can't perform tape duplication or send backups off-site because of problems with NetBackup.