Muhammed Shafi, senior Unix administrator at Pactiv Corp., a Lake Forest, Ill.-based manufacturer of packaged products such as Hefty garbage bags, said it took Symantec more than a month to resolve an issue where a multistreamed backup was able to restore files from only one stream. He had been able to perform restores with multiple streams in Version 5.1, he said.

Users also reported that the software's more sophisticated features were difficult to use because of a lack of documentation on how to configure them. Mike Sponsler, a Unix/Linux systems administrator for a Washington office of Northrop Grumman Corp. who migrated to NetBackup 6.0 from EMC Corp.'s Legato NetWorker, said he was generally happy with the product but that he was having configuration issues with advanced features such as database backup and restore.

Sponsler also said NetBackup Operations Manager, Veritas Security Services and Vault Manager also were difficult to manage. "Things such as [Veritas Security Services], the general consensus is to not use it unless it's a matter of life or death," he said.

Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec said its fourth maintenance pack is due out this month or next -- on its normal quarterly release schedule -- and that the number of reported bugs in Version 6.0 was not out of the ordinary for a release of its size. "Any time you come out with a big-scale release, over time, the same number of requests come in," Adams said.

Adams said he had not heard specifically of the issues raised by the users and did not know what problems Maintenance Pack 4 intends to correct.