Norton 360

[louiswu]

Hello,

So considering NIS 2009 is just around the corner, I imagine the symantec teams are already considering their next 360 feature list, so this is what I'd like to see.

Backup:

- Much better file selector! At the moment, it is far to cumbersome to select or deselect files that you want to be included in a backup. Currently, to deslect a folder, you have to manually and painstakingly deselect every file under that folder by browsing all the directory trees, this is not on! you should be able to deselect an entire folder and have that apply to all sub folders and files under it. Same for selecting which ones you do want backed up.

- Perhaps move the file search somewhere other than when you launch the manage interface, at the moment it makes the interface slow and cumbersome to use, increases cpu usage to 100% (maybe a bug?) and just generally feels unresponsive, this is because it searches for files to backup when you load this interface. Maybe this could become a scheduled task?

- Full drive backup. Maybe this encroaches on Norton Ghost too much (Yes, I know you're a company, you're allowed to make money :P) but given that it's a "360" product, I don't feel that protected in the event of a hard drive loss, as I'd have to reinstall the operating system again etc. It'd be nice to be able to do a full drive backup, with no other features from Ghost. At the moment I have them both running simultaniously.

Anti Virus:

- Include which virus have been discovered in some sort of history, other than just the number of virus' would be nice to be able to see when a file has been deleted, and which file, incase something you thought you wanted to keep has just dissappered without your knowledge.

Firewall:

- No complaints

Tuneup:

- The registery clean up is nice, but a registry defragger would be a welcome addition, common in a lot of registry programs.

What're your guys thoughts?

[Stu]

Those are some interesting ideas. But I'm affraid v3 will take a while

[louiswu]

Agreed, but it's more than likely they'll have begun development on it already, so now would probably be a better time than any to give some feedback.

[Stu]

maybe. I just don't want to make expectations that this will be released next month if it can take a year from now

[louiswu]

It's a fair point, I didn't mean to imply that we'd see this anytime soon, more for the developers to take into consideration.

[Stu]

It's ok. Don't worry.

[johna]

The Beta will probably be around in December I should think. I totally agree about the Virus Scan details being more thorough.

Message Edited by johna on 07-17-2008 11:16 PM

[adam_schepis]

louis,

I'm an engineer on the backup team and i can definitely confirm that the file selection will be much improved when Norton 360 v3.0 comes out.

Second, with regards to running the scan for files only when the Backup UI is launched, I can understand why this might be frustrating if you have a lot of files.  However, the reason for doing this is that users don't tend to open the backup configuration dialog very often.  As a result, we thought it would be wrong to run a scheduled task or something in the background that tracked files on the system and imposed a performance hit on the users machine at times when they aren't worrying about backup.  It was a decision based on making sure the user's overall system performance is as fast as it can be.

Finally, the spirit of the N360 backup engine is really based around the idea of backing up your important content and files as opposed to Disk and Volume based backups that Ghost does.  In my experience, file-based backup tends to be more understandable for novice users and therefore allows more of our customers to be successful with backup.  That's not to say that this won't change or be extended in the future but for the near-term I (personally) don't see it changing.

I hope this helps, and thanks for the input (we really do listen to it)

Regards,

Adam 

[louiswu]

Thanks for the reply,

Good to hear about the file selector.

In regards to the UI scanning, I see your point, and it's probably the most justifiable one, potentially a middle ground would be to implement some sort of throttling on how many resources it does use to perform these searches? I have 3 machines with norton 360 installed, two of them are multi-core and see little performance impact when using the UI, however the 3rd is a single core (Penitum M 1.7ghz) and the cpu usage shoots right up to 100% causing serious performance impact.

However, aside form cpu use, disk usage comes in second as affecting it, I don't know whether it'd be possible to keep your reads under a certain limit to allow other programs to have their fair share of disk and cpu usage, but would be nice.

As for volume backups, I don't see why implementing a *simple* volume backup (something that won't confuse novice users) can't be understandable under monkier's like "backup windows" or "backup my computer" or some sort of similarly clear notion.

I think even novice users have an understanding that backingup files /= the entire computer is backedup. I understand that a balance has to be made with 360 due to it's target audience, but I think a volume backup is definately attainable (in terms of making it understood) with a bit of work.

Maybe that's something for the research team!

Regardless, thanks for taking the time out to respond.

[mark_kanok]

louiswu,

Great feedback!  It's good to hear directly what you and other useres are looking for.  While I can't confirm our upcoming feature set, let's just say great minds think alike... and we've heard your feedback loud and clear.  :-)

For anyone else on the forums, if you have feature requests, suggestions about how things work or are described, usability nits, etc., call them out and we'll consider them internally.  Many of our favorite features so far in N360 1.0 and 2.0 were directly due to your input, so I'd like to encourage more of that.  No promises on getting everything in, but I think it's been a great source of feature validation.

Mark