I recently encountered a problem with one of our SBS servers running Symantec Backup Exec 12.  Jobs would not run and the job status kept saying “Server Paused”.  Apart from that there was also a problem with the SCSI card timing out…

I rebooted the server and the SCSI time-outs disappeared, but the job status still said “Server paused”.  Although the tabular view under the job monitor said “running”, jobs were not running, and job activity (double click on running job) gave status “server paused”.

Under the devices tab the server was not set to pause.  However, setting it to pause and then un-pausing the server resolved my problem.  (This is accomplished by right-click on the server name, underneath the “Devices” tab and then clicking on pause.)  Jobs were now running and no longer showed status “server paused” under the job activity window.

A truly strange problem, with an easy solution.

Please note that the SCSI time-outs and “server paused” seems to have been unrelated.