There appears to be some common misconceptions of how the restore process works with Norton Online Backup. The following should help clear up some of these questions and alleviate some of the possible frustration you may experience.
There are several factors to consider when you run a restore:
- The amount of data you've previously backed up.
- The length of time you've been backing up.
- The number of times you've stopped and restarted it without letting the prior request complete.
The first time you perform a backup a full copy of the files you've selected for backup are transmitted to our data centers. Subsequent backups send only he incremental changes uploaded along with any new files you've added since the last completed backup. Each one of the completed backups is then retained for later access and to help provide a full restore of any available date you opt to restore. Also as part of that backup process the data you're backing up is encrypted and compressed for secure transmission and storage.
When it comes time to restore your data your request is submitted to the servers for processing. That request has to first grab the first part of the file which is retrieved from the first instance that file exists in the backup set. In order to ensure you get the latest copy it will then also have to also get all the incremental parts from all those other backup sets. Once it has all the parts needed to re-construct your files the service will then download, in that same encrypted and compressed packet, place the data on your system and you can then access the content.
The Restore in Progress and Preparing Server message is the restore job doing all the work I've described above. Since it is a resource intensive process its all handed server side. That way all your machine has to really do, besides wait, is download the data and extract it. It can also be a time intensive process depending on how much data it has to process before it can grab the files you've requested.
What will make the process longer is if you manually cancel a restore. Every time you decide to cancel a restore job and start another immediately after the servers have to cancel the prior request. Depending on how far along it is in that gathering and building phase it can take some time.
So in short think of this whole process like a giant puzzle. If it doesn't have all the pieces it won't be able to correctly retrieve your information. When its interrupted, pieces missing so to speak, it makes the whole process all the more arduous. If you start the process and leave it to work it will work just fine.
With all of this taken into consideration a majority of cases don’t need a manual restore – just time to let the restore process run its natural course. Those types of requests can take longer than if you let the restore run and really should be reserved for when there are technical issues that go above and beyond.