My N360 Online Backup has been painfully slow for the past two months. Connection speeds have not changed, nor have the number of files being backed up, which is always approximately the same. What used to take 5 minutes now takes around 30 minutes. Percent complete used to start at around 10% before jumping to 100%, but it now sits at 0% and gradually increases in 0.1% increments until it hits around 1.3% before completing.
In an attempt to resolve the issue, I ran NRnR.exe and recreated my backup sets. In keeping with the buggy nature of N360, my online backup showed 12.0 GB of 12.0 GB available, which was expected in light of my reinstall, but when I tried to run the backup, I was advised that I had insufficient storage space. A second look at the storage available showed that I had 6.7 GB of 12.0 GB available, so I decided to delete all files. 2 hours later, it is showing 41% complete. At this rate I expect the delete operation to take at least 4 hours. It used to take around 5 minutes to do a full delete.
In an attempt to investigate this issue further, I went to https://nobu.backup.com/ to check my online backup status, but all I see is a blank page (see attached). How am I supposed to manage my backup set online?
Hello again Steve. Has anything changed? I believe there was a cloud issue with backup services being worked on at one time. But appears to be working as advertised now.
Hello Steve. I do know that Norton is moving a lot of its infrastructure onto Microsoft Azure cloud based services. As with all changes to business models that are bound to be headaches and niches. I think this is a part of that since for some time users backup accounts were undergoing maintenance. Suspect that is the base issue here. Let us know when your account becomes more functional. We will follow the thread along with you.
Hi SoulAsylum, thank you for letting me know about the update.
I updated to version 22.11.2.7 but backups are just as slow as before. I was told by Norton Support that they suspect it's a connection issue at their end. They gave no indication as to when it might be resolved.
Steve23 That's good news for a change. Albeit the number of files, how large the backup sets are have an impact on how the backup sets are updated. Personally I think there is a cloud issue, and I know that some backup accounts were undergoing maintenance. Microsoft and Symantec have partnered together to move product delivery onto Azure which is totally cloud based. That could be the culprit with your issue and others issues around the forums as well. Recommendation is to monitor things a bit further and see if the backup times improve.
Hi SoulAsylum. I have a quad-core desktop with 16 GB RAM, so I doubt device performance is an issue.
I did as you suggested and installed a trial version of NSBU, but unfortunately online backups are still slow.
At least now it reports on what’s going on, like “Collecting” and “Transferring”, and I can also see the files it’s collecting, which are only ones which have changed since the last backup. A backup with no changed files took about 11 minutes to run.
Hello again Steve23. I tested my backups a bit ago finding the dialogs appeared in a rather fast fashion for me. I do have a quad-core laptop with 6gb memory installed which MAY make a difference. Although I am performing these removals wirelessly that didn't seem to affect things. My removal from the cloud was only 495 MB as I only backup documents, email and downloaded programs for later use in the event of a catastrophe.
As Dick Evans earlier suggested an upgrade to NSBU (Norton Security with Backup) may be in order. A little more than a year ago I had issues with backups on an earlier build/version of Windows 10, and chose to install this version having had zero issues. Just a suggestion!!
Deleting backed up files is still painfully slow, and while the delete files dialogue opens immediately for local backup sets, it takes around 2 minutes for it to appear for the online backup set. Why?
360 should not slow down your operating system. Rather than doing a re installation have you tried just going through and clearing caches? I've used Ccleaner and noticed that some of the caches can get quite large over time.
https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download?gclid=EAIaIQobChMInb2bg4PX1gIVVgaGCh1PUgdWEAAYASABEgKEkfD_BwE
Thanks for your suggestion Dick, but I don't think it's possible to do that. In exchange for allowing them to monitor my backups, Norton Support offered me either a free upgrade to Norton Security with Backup, or a one-year extension on Norton 360. I took the one-year extension. In Australia at least, Norton 360 is still being offered:
N360 version 22 is also compatible. I don't think the license key for N360 and NSw/B are interchangeable though. So I'm not sure how that works as a "free upgrade".
Hi SoulAsylum. Backups are still painfully slow. My bandwidth throttle is set to fastest. The thing is, although my bandwidth was increased some six weeks ago with an upgrade to my internet hosting plan, there has been no noticeable difference in backup speed.
How long should a backup take when there is nothing to backup? What I mean is, how long should a second backup run immediately after an initial backup take? I can tell you that what used to take less than one minute now takes around nine minutes, which is consistent with my view that online backups have slowed down by a factor of 10 to 20.
You need to look at your builds going back to around five months ago when this first started happening, because something has changed in the way online backups are performed.
Hello Steve23. Sorry that I haven't followed up in awhile. Busy busy lol. How are backups working for you at the present time? Things to consider are the size of the backups and where they're backing up to. If into cloud storage your bandwidth settings in the backup are adjustable. Please see the screenshot. All Norton services are showing green across the board at the present time as well. Please let us know if we can assist further.
All: Norton released an update to the product via live update. The new version is 22.10.1.10 run live updates and reboot your systems. Hopefully the patch will correct something and allow backups to perform as they should. Please post whether that is the case or not if you'd be so kind.
Hi SoulAsylum, this is still unresolved - the support ticket has gone nowhere and I haven't heard from them in more than a week. Norton support advised me that the reason it is so slow is that an individual call has to be made to the backup engine for every file in the backup set, which sounds ridiculous.
The thing is, I used to see a local file (I think it had a .dat extension) being updated at the end of the backup, which no longer occurs. Was this file used to synchronize the incremental backup set with the server, so that only changed files have calls made to the backup engine? Is the absence of this file the reason why every file in the backup set needs to be checked? Even a second backup run immediately after the first one takes a long time to complete, so maybe this explains it.