I am the system administrator for my company and in charge of managing our backup infrastructure. I, like most other sys admins thought that this upgrade would be smooth, painless and problem free as have been my upgrades from 10d-11d, 11d-12, 12-2010. Unfortunately this is not the case.
I will start with the migration of your existing jobs. If like me you have multiple servers that share similar characteristics in regards to backing up you will most likely have a job that encompasses multiple servers. My backup job had 12 servers in it. After migrating the job to 2012 I found that it had actually disappeared. What it had been replaced with is a single job for each server, all listed individually. You can see the problem. Now when I need to change a setting on this backup job I have to change it on every single server individually. Wow what a great feature.
Next I should try and describe what they have done with the well-loved, tried and tested interface that had taken tens of years of research, customer feedback and hard work to create. They binned it and replaced it with what I can only describe as an insult to my intelligence. You see Backup Exec assumes that this software is to be used by people with the mental age of about 5, possibly 6. I'm not kidding when I say they have drastically reduced your ability to have complete control and granularity over your backups. Here are some examples; Sometimes I need to exclude a particular job from running on a particular day - maybe because it will clash with another manually run job I have started. You can no longer exlude individual jobs! What, surely not I hear you say? Well its true, when you click the exclude button on the very difficult to navigate, badly designed an hideous looking calendar it excludes all of your jobs at the same time. Why would I want this? I should have the choice, why am I forced to exclude ALL of my jobs? Another bugbear is why we are forced to choose between weekday or weekend. I want to specifiy certain days for certain backups as I did before - whats the matter don't you trust that people are capable of figuring out what a weekday is? I loved the scheduler in BE 2010, it worked so well. It is sorely missed.
Occasionally I like to view the jobs I currently have running, maybe I need to know how far through a particular job is or just want to see all my jobs at a glance. Bad luck. The job monitor has been removed, I can no longer see any of my running jobs. A half-baked attempt at resolving this was to add the 'View All Jobs' button in service pack but it still doesn't show inventory/cleaning jobs and is horrible to look it.
Cleaning Tapes. I have a Quantum Super Loader 3 Tape library, that once in a while requires a cleaning tape to be run through it. This worked perfectly in BE 2010. Since upgrading to BE 2012 I am told 'The cleaning tape has expired' every time I try to run it. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to live with a dirty tape unit.
Backup to Disk - as I generally use tapes this is not a feature I often use. However when I have used it I found a significant problem. I am not allowed to choose the folder I want to backup to? BE 2012 forces you to select a drive and then creates its own folder structure that means nothing to most people.
The interface. I have touched on this before but it is just horrible, over simplified, removal of multiple necessary features, confused design, too many clicks required to get where you need, hiding important options etc etc etc. If Symantec want to remain in the business of backing up people's data they need to take a good hard look at some of the comments on this forum as there re thousands of sys admins like me who are prepared to switch to Acronis & co if these show stopping faults are not rectified. I ask the developers/designers what an earth were you thinking and in which world was this ever a good idea? You had a great product and you trashed it, badly. Very sad, Veritas are turning in their grave.