Strange question huh?
I have a desktop and a laptop, neither of which have internal drives big enough for my stuff, so I use an external 2TB drive as my primary storage drive for everything except programs, and have another 2TB drive that I use for Norton 360 to back up all those files. Most of the time this is using the desktop.
However, when I travel sometimes for a few months at a time I plug my main 2TB into my laptop and all is cool. Now I want to keep maintaining that drive's backup status by also plugging in the backup 2TB and using Norton 360 from the laptop. I don't want to wait until home again to do the backup of all changes.
My suspicion is that when I set it up that way, latpop Norton will think it's a whole new drive and a new backup drive, and start all over again. Don't know what will happen when I plug them back into desktop.
I'd love to use an internet cloud solution but my Verizon wifi bandwidth costs by the GB and the bill would be huge. I do keep a few real critical files out there using Dropbox, so those are in sync at all times between the two computers as well as on my smartphone.
Any suggestions to do what I want and have Norton keep it all in sync between the two computers?
Thanks,
Don
Hi dsttexas.
You could plug them in as you want to use them. Then open N360: Backup: Manage Backup Files -
Then look at what it says about your standard backup set.
Does it show that the location it expects to back-up to is the disk you want? If everything looks fine, then you could try it and see. If it is showing anything odd then it would probably do a new full back-up.
If N360 thinks there has been a major change it may do a full backup but I know of no way to be sure before it does it. If anyone else does - please say so. The two worst aspects of that would be the time it would take and possibly the space it takes. The space is a "possible" as sometimes I have seen these extra full back-ups being added to the size of the original file. It might just replace the old backup.
You could also try a test when you have your two machines together. Set them up as you normally have them and create a new test back-up set. Put a limited number of files into it to keep the processing time down. After it has run successfully once, change a couple of the files and run it again. This should produce a very quick incremental backup. Now separate your two machines and set the disks up as you would when traveling. Again change one or two of the test files. Now run the backup again and see if it runs an incremental backup (as you wish) just processing the changed files or, if it runs a completely new backup.
Once you have run the test, you will know the answer to your question and you may delete the test back-up set.
Does that help?