Good Day. Woke up this morning to find that most of our overnight backup jobs did not run. Logged into the BE server console to find that every one of our jobs showed 'Invalid Schedule' in the job monitor screen. When attempting to edit/view job details I received a message similar to 'Invalid job data' or some such (I didn't record the message text.) Quite disturbing this.
After verifying no issues at the database server, I restarted BE services which seemed to re-refernece the job schedule data from the database and suddenly everything seemed to return to normal; Schedules were displayed properly. There is very little to no information from Symantec regarding this other than a few other posts regarding the existance of the issue and no solutions or work-arounds. Symantec recognizes the behavior as a known issue with BE 2010 and has stated that it would be resolved with BE 2012 as the scheduling logic was re-worked (https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH178600.html) however apparently this is not entirely accurate. Since I've just seen the issue occur in BE 2014 SP2, it obviously has not been entirely resolved. The article mentions that it occurs when certian days are selected for the job schedule and while we have jobs scheduled by way of 'every week' and selecting individual days on which the jobs run we don't have any exclusions or exceptions which also seem to be a factor in the issue described by others who have experienced this in the past.
That said, in this particular instance it seems that the issue was purily a failure at the BE service level and a simple restart of all BE services resolved the issue, however I can't confirm a successful test without waiting for the backup jobs to run on schedule this evening and see what happens.
Anyone have any deeper technical information as to what might cause this and how to go about avoiding a reoccurrance in the future? I've seen comments mentioning to perform database maintenance, however I know that BE performs some kind of maintenance every evening on a schedule, so I don't immediately believe that is a direct technical answer as much as a stab in the dark.