Recently I began getting the message "backup did not completed successfully" with the associated at Risk message in the summary page. I later noticed that the drive where my backup folder is located was full because the backup folder grew to occupy all available disk space. Maybe I'm getting this message because the disk is full.
What is going on here? Is this normal behavior of the backup utility?
This happened to me too. I had a 1 TB external USB and my 400 GB of data on C: (with exclusions of system files and other stuff) filled it. I figured that Norton Backup had a rotating backup scheme that deleted older supplementary backups with newer ones, occaisonally refreshed with a full backup, etc. so I bought a couple of 2 TB HDs and a RAID 1 enclosure. Nothing else writes to that drive. Now, N360 backup has filled this drive (well, I do have almost 77KB left, about 0.01%). I've had other problems and uninstalled and reinstalled, upgraded, etc. since all this started. This isn't just temp files left over, it's beeng going on for months with drive sizes of 1 TB and 2 TB. Unless the software responds to the space limitation and starts overstoring old supplementary backups, I will get the "drive full" message very shortly. And, I have never observed a refresh with backup size reduced to about the size of the files backed up.
If indeed this is the way that a rotating backup policy works, the maximum capacity should be a software setting, and I do not see that. Thus I conclude that this growing backup size is *not* an artifact of a rotating backup policy.
Your issue sounds different than the one originally described yet similar. Have you touched base with the support team yet to review the matter?
Norton 360's backup options are different from Norton Online Backup for one primary reason: It provides the option to backup to local media as well as online. If its filling a external drive up it sounds like you chose the option for a local backup. I'd really need to know more about your config to help out or have you contact our support team.
I did, and I had a live chat. It turns out that they wamted me to abandon my full 2 TB HD and turn on Norton web backup, but I don't want to do that because I have perfectly good paid-for backup media on my desk. And, I don't want to put my data, even my backup data, at risk of deletion forever with a credit card glitch, forgotton renewal, or clerical error.
So, he wanted me to move to a dormant 3 TB external drive that I keep around for moving files and drives. After pressing repeatedly about what this would tell us, it turns out that N360 Backup sees my eSATA RAID 1 backup drive as external, thus puts full backups on it every time. And, it erases the index files that are necessary to find the old files, and intermingles the old and new files so that it is impossible to delete old backups. Of course this makes the old backup data inaccessible.
Thus the eSATA drive will eventually fill up no matter how large it is, and the memory of the backup is only the time between N360 bacups. This would work for backing up to BD but is just next to worthless to me with my 2 TB eSATA RAID 1 HD. But, with this information, I determined that N360 backup cannot meet my needs and I turned it off. I'm using Acronis backup right now and will look at Norton Utilities to see if there is a standard rotating backup (full once a week or month, incrementals every night or two, deletion of old incrementals on a rotating basis). If so I will consider NU, but at a price approcahing that of N360 I will likely end up using one of the backup utilities that I alreadh have that does a rotating backup, such as Acronis or Nero.
Consider this a request to add an "Advanced" menu to N360 backup that allows setting up for a rotating backup.
Recently I began getting the message "backup did not completed successfully" with the associated at Risk message in the summary page. I later noticed that the drive where my backup folder is located was full because the backup folder grew to occupy all available disk space. Maybe I'm getting this message because the disk is full.
What is going on here? Is this normal behavior of the backup utility?