I had a hard disk failure on my main internal disk (C:) which contained Norton 360 v3 which had been installed at the beginning of Apr 09 (Upgraded from v2, which I believe was the version running on the machine prior to Apr 09). I had been using Norton 360 to run automatic back-ups to an externally connected drive (J: drive, via Firewire).
Now that I have rebuilt my main internal disk, and downloaded and re-installed Norton 360 v3, I'm trying to recover the Norton backup data from my J drive. I can see two backup sets in the N360_BACKUP folder, one from June 2008 (around 40Gb), and one from Aug 2009 (approx 100 Gb, the one I want to recover). Reading through threads on this forum, I've located ARestore.exe (version 2.5.2.4) and ARestore.loc from my fresh Norton 360 v3 install, put them in the J: Drive root folder and attempted to use the Portable Restore utility.
To make a long story short, ARestore only works if I remove the Aug 09 backup from the N360_BACKUP folder. If the Aug 09 backup is in the same folder with June 08, then I get a message that Norton Portable Restore "needs to close" shortly after launch (Windows XP crash notification). If the June 08 backup set is in the N360_BACKUP folder on its own, then Portable Restore appears to work (but is not very useful to me since the data is greater than one year old).
If the Aug 09 backup set is the only one in the N360_BACKUP folder, then Portable Restore will crash every time. I've done trial and error troubleshooting (such as moving the backup.@db file out of the folder), but nothing seems to work. From as much as I can tell, the Aug 09 backup set looks "complete" (with subfolders, etc), the date looks about right, and the size is around what I expected it should be. I've had no problems with my external J drive. So what could be wrong with this backup set? Why can't Portable Restore process it?
I hope someone can help me because this will be a major loss of confidence in Norton 360 if the backup function is this flaky.
Is there nobody who can give me any suggestions as to how to determine if a backup set is truly useable? Or is all my backup data toast?
So far I am not at all impressed with Norton 360’s backup utility and would have to say to anyone using it under the following circumstances to be very wary of any sense of security you feel about having your important files protected:
- Norton 360 installed on main internal hard drive - external drive connected to PC and selected as the destination drive for Norton 360 backups - main internal drive has a problem and needs to be rebuilt - Norton 360 reinstalled on rebuilt internal drive - Norton 360 doesn’t recognize any data on the external drive - No problem, you think? Use “portable restore” function? - Portable Restore crashes when asked to examine the most recent backup set!!!
This is highly frustrating. At no point over the history of using the product did any warning appear indicating that the backup data was not safe. Quite the opposite in fact, the product happily tells you that the backup has been completed successfully. From my experience, I warn anyone thinking that they can get their data back to be very, very suspicious of 360 backup.
Am having the same problem with Portable Restore failing. Tried all the fixes I could find on this site including moving the db file, transfering backup folder onto local drive after Portable Restore kept failing over the USB connection from the external drive, etc.
Nothing works. I'm not pleased with Norton at the moment... the thought of losing 40 GBs of my essential files that I believed to be protected has me kicking myself for not disabling Norton's backup feature in the beginning. If I had just used to WD software that came on my drive, I'd be accessing my files by now.
What do we need to do to get a Symantec employee to address this issue already?
I've been in touch with Norton Live Chat Tech Support. Initial technician could not solve. Supervisor was not much better, and could not fix. Case has now been transferred to "Design Team" and I'm expecting contact within 24 to 48 hours. Will post any solutions, if found.
Have tried moving my external drive to two additional computers (one a brand new laptop) and ran ARestore.exe with no joy. Removing the backup.@db file gives a glimspe of hope, Norton Portable Restore chugs along for many minutes trying to rebuild the catalog file (presumably), but will always crash, eventually. Have tried an older version of ARestore.exe also, with no luck.
Once again - for those using Norton 360v3 Backup function, use with caution!!!
Another possibility is that you send us the drive, and we can take a look and see what can be recovered.
As for your doubts regarding the reliability of Norton 360 as a backup solution; in all fairness, the effectiveness of a backup is contingent on the integrity of the backup data.
If the backup becomes corrupted, it will be impossible for any backup solution whatsoever to recover the corrupted data.
Anyway, if you could provide dumps, let me know, and I will provide you a location to upload them for analysis.
If you would like to send us your drive, I can look into shipping arrangements for you.
The link you provided takes me to a discussion on Disc optimization? I'm not sure how that's relevant for obtaining crash dumps, unless I'm missing something....
I'm using XP Media Center 32 bit operating system, and the program that I'm trying to get to work is ARestore.exe which is Norton Portable Restore (included with Norton 360). When it runs, it creates a process ARestore in the Task Manager, which will crash quickly if I leave the backup.@db file in the Backup set folder. If I remove the backup.@db file, ARestore will run for a long time, gradually consuming more and more memory until it gets to a certain point when the CPU spikes sharply and the program crashes.
If you could point me to relevant instructions for creating a crash dump for ARestore, then I'll be happy to forward the results.
The second crash you described sounds like an out-of-memory crash.
I think the first crash is probably going to be the most useful for us, to see what's wrong with the catalog, so if you get a chance to reproduce and get a dump file, I'll send you a location to post those and we'll take a look.
The full dump will take more time for the tool to write out, but will have the most information and would be preferable.
Since ARestore failure does not result in Windows Blue Screen of Death, there are no minidump files produced (as far as I can tell).
I am trying to get you dump files using ADPlus debugging tool for Windows, but I am out of my depth somewhat with using this tool.
I've tried the command:
Adplus -quiet -crash -sc C:\ARestore.exe
I've run this under both scenarios which will crash ARestore (with the backup.@db file in place, and with the backup.@db file removed from the Backup Set directory).
This creates Dump files (.DMP and text files) that I can upload (please provide location). I'm not 100% sure as to whether I'm doing this properly, please let me know what to change if I'm doing something incorrectly.
Looking deeper into the Dump files I produced using ADPlus debugger, I'm not sure they will be much use. I believe they only contain First Chance exception dumps which are taken before ARestore crashes. I thought there should be Second Chance dump files produced when ARestore runs wild with memory & CPU and quits suddenly, but ADPlus doesn't seem to produce these. The time stamps on the Dump files it does produce for the First Chance exceptions are well before the ARestore failure event.
So whatever is causing Norton Portable Restore to crash seems to be more complicated - I'm reaching the end of my patience with this product. I'm also growing tired feeling as though I am part of a debugging team for a beta product. Norton Tech support doesn't honour its commitment to call back within a promised time frame either - why even bother suggesting that someone is looking into my case and keep me hanging on when obviously nothing is happening?
What is really upsetting is being made to feel as though my use of the Norton 360 product is somewhat unusual, or that somehow I'm asking it to do things that it wasn't designed to do. Folks, this is a routine backup of essential files to an external drive - something that the product is supposed to do (and in fact the newly installed version continually taunts me with the amber exclamation mark reminding me to setup a new backup!!!).
It would seem that my most recent backup set has become corrupt somehow - but since nobody in Norton seems to have a clue about Portable Restore, this fills me doubt that my setup has caused the corruption. Any data corruption I feel is more likely to have been caused by sloppy programming within Norton 360, or problems with transitioning from V2 to V3, or some other Symantec-generated bug.
So if my only option is to send in a hard drive containing the "corrupt" Backup Set to Symantec, please let me know how to get this done (I am in Canada).
Although Portable Restore still does not work, and the Norton 360 program itself does not recognize its own Backup Set, I've found that by using the technique described by jebber1 in the thread linked below, I am able to recover (so far) more and more of my files in the "corrupt" backup.
The process is exactly as jebber1 describes - slow, with little feedback to know if it's working, and it will look like it has stopped responding - so patience is the key.