Last night, after the monthly MS Patch Tuesday (Win 10 Pro) and subsequent reboot, I ran a backup, like I always do, with no other apps open. The backup is to a networked drive attached to my router. Last night, instead of doing a backup of things that had changed, it appeared to attempt to do a full backup some 35000 files. Since that takes 5 hours, I went to bed. This morning, it was stuck at 56% backing up a photo that had been backed up years ago. No cursor, no spinning things, nothing. I assumed it had failed so I closed the window and started again. It finished in 3 minutes backing up 6 files.
My questions: Why did it try to do a full backup? Why did it fail? What is the status of my backup? How do I be assured that my PC's files are really backed up?
Simple answer is - I have no idea why it tried to do a full backup.
Sadly Norton backup does seem to do this on occasions and it can lead to excessively large backups. Which seems to have happened to you.
My suggestion is that you should start again with a new backup set. Ideally to a new external drive with sufficient space on it. Then you could clean down your old drive and start again. If you only have the one drive then you would have to take the risk and hope that no failure occurs between you starting to clean down the old drive and the new backup being completed.
Because of this problem I always run to separate but identical backups (to the same drive) then if either starts to grow too much I can safely delete it and restart always protected by the other one.
I hope that makes some sense and is of some use to you.
