Well, I was switching from NERO to Save&Restore 2. I have 700-GB harddrive and 120-GB USB drive for backups. So it’s impossible to back up my entire harddrive as it is supposed to be. So I’ve decided to rely on ‘file and folder’ backups. Full backup of my files took about 15 minutes. First incremental backup took about 4 minutes. In about a half-year, process of incremental backups was taking more and more time, last time it was 30+ minutes. That’s while there were NO big changes to the files, each day some tiny Word/Excel files were added, and maybe some pics or music files occasionally… So I don’t understand why it takes so long to incrementally back up these files.
After that, I’ve had a major system failure and had to re-format my harddrive. I am VERY lucky that I didn’t rely on Norton’s backup fully and made another backup. Because Norton FAILED. After reformatting of my harddrive, I’ve noticed that ‘file and folder’ backup data consists of thousands of folders with junky names, containing each thousands of files with junky names, e.g. I have no idea where I can find files I need to restore. And Norton used some hidden indexing files to organize this mess. Since I was unaware of these mysterious index files, the only way to restore at least something was to ‘import backup destination’. Importing ALL thousand of backup folders took 10+ hours, which resulted in an error. No single file was restored. But even if I choose single folder, there’s no list of what is there. You have to import a folder with crappy name first and then type some file name you want to restore. If it is there, it will appear in the list. If not – YOU FAILED. Well… What’s the purpose of this bleep MESS ???
To countermeasure this negative feedback with something good, I must say that I am quite happy with drive image backups. Now my harddrive has two partitions: 50-GB system partition and 650+ GB for documents and applications. I use drive backups for system partition and I like its compression ratio. I didn’t try to restore system partition yet, but hope that it will work, at least.
BUT I still don’t understand the purpose of ‘file and folder’ backup. I don’t keep my documents and other important files on my system partition. Because if Windows will be damaged and I will need to reformat that partition, I will lose all my data again. And I can’t use ‘file and folder backup’ because it relies on some hidden and cryptic index files that are presumably stored on my system drive. So, again, if I will have to restore that system drive, I will lose the most current index files. And while file and folder recovery points will still exist on backup destination, they will become unreachable because Norton will not know where to find them.
So for now, the only way is to use Norton for harddrive backups and free 7-Zip or other program to backup my documents and important data. HA-HA-HA, I’ve paid you 70+ bucks for RELIABLE backup solution – and now I must add another FREE program to make REALLY RELIABLE backups. HA-HA-HA! Maaaan, that’s weeeeeeeeird…
And yes, here goes bonus question. As I can see, all of Symantec’s products except for 360 and Internet Security are not updated lately. Looks like that Ghost, Save&restore and SystemWorks will be abandoned soon. Is this true? So that I can switch back to Nero, knowing that I’ll miss nothing, since there will be no updates to Save&Restore ???