Bally said he doesn't plan on rolling out NetBackup 6.0 until the vaulting service issues are fixed, so he has not yet experienced the scheduler problem described by several other users on the Web site forums for Symantec customers.

There are about 36,000 users of NetBackup, according to Symantec. Mike Adams, group manager for Symantec's NetBackup product marketing, said he could not say how many of those users have migrated to Version 6.0. "Anecdotal evidence" is that there is "good uptake," he said.

One major issue Veritas users cited with NetBackup 6.0 is that when a backup job indicates it's complete, it often has only backed up 1K files, so there's no data to restore. Bally characterized Veritas 5.1, which he was using before 6.0, as "solid" but said he wanted to use Version 6.0 for new services, such as the ability to restore Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server services.

Another major problem reported by users is an issue with the Job Manager. Due to problems with this feature, "NetBackup management went from maybe 30 percent of my time to 60 percent or more," said Phil Rand, senior systems analyst and systems administrator for Seattle Pacific University. Not only did backup jobs fail, but they would disappear from the activity monitor so that Rand might not notice they were missing, he said. Rand has received binaries from Symantec, in advance of Maintenance Pack 4, to help him fix the problem, he said.

Other users are reporting problems with multistreaming backups and restores, which establish multiple connections, or threads, from a single system to the backup server. This is useful for users with a large system with multiple I/O devices and large amounts of data that need backing up. Some jobs would retry hundreds or thousands of times, even though the actual backup was completed successfully, Rand said.