@Super Phishing Phryer, I suppose by your the tone of your response you feel the need to ridicule a customer's experience with your company's support? Well your response prompted me to go back to refresh my memory and to look up the actual case, it was [Removed].
First, I want to say that I was incorrect, I was not on the phone for many hours but it was an online chat.
Second, what I wrote in my response to Algeric was correct, Automatic Norton backup will only work correctly with using their cloud service.
To be more clear, you cannot use an external hard drive and use the Automatic backup feature. Norton Backup cannot distinguish between an existing initial full incremental backup and subsequent incremental backups. It just performs a full backup over and over again.
Here's the message stream of that support chat session
11:00 PM Me: Ok, so are you saying that the local backup will always create new backups of files in the destination drive but not on the Cloud drive?
11:01 PM [Support]: Exactly.
Mr. Mane went on to write..."Now I will explain you about the OFFline backup that is External drive backup."
11:02 PM [Support]: Whenever we use the External Drvie Backup, we cannot set it to Automatic because the external drive won't be connected to computer for all the time. User may remove it for any other use.
11:03 PM [Support]: So, if it get set for Automatic and at the time of backup if the drive won't be available, it will create the issue and backup will not perform.
11:03 PM [Support]: That is the reason, External drive backup create the New Folder every time we run the backup.
11:03 PM [Support]: And that is the reason it duplicates the data but in different folder.
11:03 PM [Support]: This is how your External drive is taking more space.
11:04 PM [Support]: In this case, the best solution would be,
11:13 PM [Support]: Me, Norton was never had an option to continue with same Backup Set on External Drive. It will continue the same backup set only if we are running backup on System Hard Drive that is C: and D : drive on your computer.
So unlike other backup solutions that has the ability to do a Incremental backups to external hard drives without filling them up almost immediately, Norton Security can only perform this type of backup to their own cloud storage.
I've always been a Norton customer since the 90s and trust Symantec Antivirus protection as well, but making light of a customer who is speaking the truth doesn't live up to many people's expectation of good service.
"Thanks and take care
"