Issue abstract: How to Back Up to Portable Hard Drive and Not to the Cloud
Detailed description: I have recently transferred a Norton 360 licence to a new laptop. I have another licence on my desktop. When I open Norton 360 on the laptop I cant see anywhere on the user interface that allows me to do a backup to a portable hard drive. The only option available seems to be to the cloud. Im on a limited data plan and backing up to the cloud is not the ideal option for me. Ive been backing up to a portable hard drive for many years and wouild like to still be able to do this. Can someone please help. Thanks
Product & version number:
OS details:
What is the error message you are seeing?
NA
If you have any supporting screenshots, please add them:Ivew attached a screen shot of my user interface from the “Home > Security” tab.
I have an external drive plugged in (Local Disk E). Norton is only recognising the two partitions (Drives C and D) on the desktop. The Norton Security > Cloud Backup pages has greyed out text referring to “backups on external drives”
Were you using this external drive on the old laptop for Norton backups?
Have you tried scrolling down the drives listed for the Where tab for your backup set? The window for the list of drives is not too large and you may not see all drives by default.
Yes - the external drive was used previously. I dont get a “where” tab. I get a drop down tab which has Drives C and D listed, but its under the heading of “Data Cache on Local Disk”. Apparently this is where Norton backups the data if the Clould allocation is full. But that’s not what I want. I want the backup to go directly to an external drive, as I’d prefer not to use the Cloud. This is very fruystrarting. It seems to have arisen becasue I installed the latest version of Norton 360 Deluxe, firstly on the new laptop and then sadly also on the old desktop. The user interface for the new version is completely different from the version I used to have on the desktop
Im currenlty in Chat session with Nortons Support team. They are trying to tell me that Norton 360 doesnt provide the option of backing up to an external drive.
Norton has notes (home/current/solutions/v19213795) that mirror what I used to do for backing up to an external drive, but they are not applicable to the new version
The backup never worked that way. If the cloud storage was full the backup would just fail with a message to buy more storage.
And it definitely did back up to external drives as you say you had done and I have also done that.
It could be a change in behaviour with the new 360 ver 24.x.x.x. Unfortunately, that version is being released in a really slow manner. Even the gurus here do not have access to it yet to fully be able to help users.
So Support told you the new version no longer supports external drives. What I would suggest is contacting them again tomorrow to see if a different agent can come up with a suggestion. It has happened before.
All: Norton Security Ultra ( still on version 22.24.5.6 ) will indeed backup to my external HD as shown below. I do not currently have a N360 install to test, however. These should be the same on both.
I am sure I didnt install the Windows app. What I actually did was send a link to myself at new laptop. This was the link created by Norton when I told them I wanted to transfer one of the 3 licences. Perhaps their system is incorrectly set up and sends links to the Windows App instead of the Windows 11 version. A very frustrating afternoon, and again thansk to the community.
After spending best part of the afternoon in a Chat season I finally got the support team to take my problem seriously. The solution being: uninstall the Norton360 version I had installed, reboot the computer and then download and install the file they specified.
I am sure I didnt install the Windows app. What I actually did was send a link to myself at new laptop. This was the link created by Norton when I told them I wanted to transfer one of the 3 licences. Perhaps their system is incorrectly set up and sends links to the Windows App instead of the Windows 11 version. A very frustrating afternoon, and again thanka to the community.
After spending best part of the afternoon in a Chat season I finally got the support team to take my problem seriously. The solution being: uninstall the Norton360 version I had installed, reboot the computer and then download and install the file they specified.
“So Support told you the new version no longer supports external drives.” That’s correct. I was then part of a pass the parcel with in total 5 support people being invovled. Thankfully the Olympics are over and Ive been looking for a new sport to take up.
