This is intended for developers...hopefully you'll find some merit in these remarks and incorporate the suggestions into future product improvements.
Overall I am very satisfied with the Norton 360 product. It's secure, user friendly and cost effective compared to other products. But that said, the backup function included within 360 is substandard at best. And probably more accurately described as poor...
The first issue with this function is that it does not backup external hard drives. My wife and I have a wireless external hard drive that we store the majority of our data...pictures, school work, etc. Your product will only backup files that are physically located on the computer...external hard drives are not able to be included in any backup set. It would be extremely helpful to include the ability to backup any data on any drive accessible by our computers, regardless of whether or not that drive is an external drive or not.
The second issue with the backup function is that you save an unlimited number of copies of backed up files. Files such as pictures or music will not change. But other files (such as an Outlook data file) may change frequently. For example, my Outlook data file is 500MB in size and could potentially change every five minutes. Which means that it could theoretically be backed up every five minutes. Given that capacity is not unlimited and you charge by the gigabyte, it requires me to manually maintain these backed up copies to delete older ones. It would be a very nice feature to include the ability for the user to specify the number of backed up versions of files to keep (1, 3, all, etc.) and have the backup function automatically remove the oldest version when this limit is reached and a new copy is backed up.
The last issue, and this is arguably the most important...your product requires an initial backup of everything before it will start backing up only those files that have changed since the last time backed up. I have a MASSIVE amount of data stored on my computer. This past weekend, I initiated a backup that ran for 19 hours, uploaded over 5000 files and only got to 78% completion before the backup failed (due to disruption of the Internet connection). This happens often. And it seems to be unnecessary. I'd like to suggest that the process be changed to the following:
- User defines the set of files that are backed up
- The backup process starts by choosing a file and determining if this is a new file or if it has been changed since the last time it was backed up. If yes, back it up.
- Move onto the next file.
- Let this process continue indefinitely without requiring all files be backed up once before the incremental backups can start.
There is no benefit to the user requiring the initial backup...it is in fact creating problems. I have spoken with tech support who suggested creating multiple backup sets of different chunks of data. This is nothing more than a workaround and does not remove the real problem. And it creates the additional issue of me having to ensure that as new data is created on my computer that I've included it in a backup set.
Again, overall I am very satisfied with the 360 product. But the backup functionality needs some real improvements. Other products, such as AVG LiveKive do provide the ability to backup external drives. And Bitdefender Total Security will manage the number of backed up copies, so these things can be done. I would love it if these suggestions could be incorporated into your products.
Thank you, and hopefully you can make these happen! :-)