Norton 360

[draexo]

I can not find this topic covered here in the forums or in online help.

I am backing up 75gb of data from my home computer to a networked drive elsewhere in the house.

Everything was fine when I started this process.  Now a month into it, the backup set is still about those same 75gb (even when I click preview), however, the norton backup directory is showing 212GB used.  What is that about?

Why is the norton backup directory 3 times the size of the actual backup?

Is this a full or incremental backup?  I can not seem to locate this information, but it would make sense that it is incremental.

[DistEd2 Super Bot Obliterator Mobile Master (Norton Mobile Users Discussion Forum)]

Hi, draexo,

Welcome to our community!

There are a couple of possibilities on your backup size issue (and it could be a combination of the two also). First, I have personally experienced an issue (never did figure out what's causing it; pretty sure it's something in Windows) where the archive bit was always set for needing to be backed up--so every time I ran a backup, it ended up being, in effect, a full backup. If you're in the same situation, you'd run up that much space pretty quickly.

Second possibility is that Windows dynamically sets the size of the blocks in which disk space is allocated based on the size of the drive: bigger drive = bigger blocks. Since the last block it takes to store each file is never full (there's always some amount of space left over after the last little bit of the file has been written), this results in every file taking just a little more space to store on a bigger drive than on a smaller one. And when you're talking about, say, 25,000 files to back up, that "wasted" space multiplies with every iteration of your backup.

It's also possible that there's some "overhead" involved, but I wouldn't normally expect that to be too significant.

Returning to your question about the nature of a Norton backup, I'm pretty sure it's incremental by default, because I've been involved in several threads here where the OP had gone through applying layers and layers if incremental restores to get everything back. And I had several years of evidently incremental automatic backups on my own installation before the archive bit issue I mentioned struck.

[draexo]

Well... then I suspect it is doing a full backup.  Not sure why.  Not sure how to change it either as there seem to be very few controls availalbe in the Norton 360 backup preferences. 

I am familiar with block sizes and I am set pretty small.  The first backup used about the same of the preview - 75gb or so.  Now a month later it is way up there.

I back up music/pictures/vids/documents to the internet using a different program.  I figured it would be nice to have a local backup of everything just in case.  But without the means to adjust it, I am stuck looking at other options.

Unless someone knows how to change this to an incermental backup with options of a full backup every 2 weeks??

[RoloX2]

Slack space (due to cluster size) isn't it since the default cluster size is 4K for all volumes up to 16TB.

Your 75GB preview is only showing files that have changed and will, consequently, be backed up on the next run; it is like an incremental backup except that it is only updating the sole archive rather than creating a new one.  (I wish N360 did real incremental backups rather than overwriting a good backup with a potentially bad one.)

To prove this, create a new backup set with the same files/folders and run a preview; I bet its 212GB.

[draexo]

No.  I just attempted a new backup set with the same files and it is 76GB.

[RoloX2]

And that's why I'm not a betting man.  :D

I have no ideas on that one.  You can delete your current backup archive and re-run it to reclaim the space.

But...that doesn't answer the question, "What went wrong?"