I have a one terabyte external i use for back-up, but my hard drive has only about 200 gigs on it. The external is almost full!! How can my back-up possibly be this large!?! My current theory is that there is old back-ups from the last version of Norton that weren't deleted. I need this fixed if possible, I'd rather not buy another hard drive. Also, when i delete something off my computer, does it disappear from the back-up? I see that excluding files doesn't get rid of them, so what's the point in that? Thanks.
Hi Parcel32.
Welcome to the Norton Community Forums. 
Unfortunately it would appear that the backups on N360 occasionally start growing for no reason I have been able to identify. The result being what you have found. The simple solution can be to just delete the old backup and re-run. However there may be space constraints on doing this in a completely risk free manner so would you mind answering a few question?
Are you running the latest version of N360? (21.1.018 I believe.)
How much free space is left on your external drive?
How many backup sets does N360 show when you go to Backup: Manage Backup sets? (is it just the one, probably "Default Backup set"?)
When in "Manage Backup sets", if you select the "Preview" option, how large does it say that the backup should be?
I look forward to hearing back from you and hope that we can get your problem sorted quickly and without the need for a new drive.
I have the latest version 21.1.0.18. I have only one backup set, Default. I have 11.7 MB left The preview shows 43.7 GB. The actual back-up is around 900 GB.
Hi Parcel32.
Thanks for the info. It is a shame that the space needed for a fresh backup is less than the free space on your disk. 
If you have anywhere else you could temporarily put a 44 GB backup then I would suggest that you amend the "where" part of your Backup definition and run a backup to that location manually. If you can do that it would give you protection while you try the next bit which will leave you briefly without any backup.
Use Microsoft Explorer to look at your external drive. You will see a root directory called N360_BACKUP. This contains all of your backup. (If there are any other directories on the disk containing anything else that can be deleted to free up 44 GB for a temporary backup then come back and we can reconsider the approach slightly.)
If you select the N360_BACKUP directory in Microsoft Explorer and delete it (it will take some time) then you will have freed up all that space and you can then run your backup again manually to create a new clean backup that will only take up around 44 GB. This would give you a new clean backup and lots of free space on your disk.
The downside is that you will not have a backup for the period of the delete and the re-run of the backup. However in the scale of things that is not long and unless you have reason to believe that you machine is about to die, you are probably fairly safe.
If anything above is unclear please feel free to come back and ask for a clarification.
Do come back and tell us what you do and how you get on. It always helps us help others and I have some other suggestions as to how you might better protect yourself in future but I do not wish to complicate things for you at the moment.
Good luck.
Mike
Pacel32 said << The actual back-up is around 900 GB. >>
Isn't that what he is concerned about? How can that be?
I'm wondering myself.
I've never used this drive for anything but back-ups, so i'm not sure what each folder is for. I assumed the used space equals what the back-up is, maybe it isn't.
I've attached a screen shot of the folder. Can anyone tell me what each folder is for?
Note on attachment, i renamed the ext because for some strange reason they don't allow pics.
just change it to .jpeg
i have another smaller drive. I assumed the back-up was really huge so i didn't think it would work. I could put the new one on there, then delete everything off the bigger drive.
let me try that
I don't see any attachments but you can INSERT jpgs into the message text using the tree-like 
icon on the editor toolbar.
Just browse to find the file where you saved it on your PC and it will be copied up onto the Forum server. There may be a delay for moderation before it appears but you will see a placemarker.
Judging by all the dates, and what the new back-up consisted of, i think i figured out what’s from old back-ups. It would be nice if newer versions of norton got rid of the old back-ups from previous versions. I kind of assumed you guys knew what you’re doing i’ll have to keep an eye on things i guess.
Parcel,
Do please hang around to see what develops. Mike has raised this direct with Norton Staff who work on the programs themselves and do reply either to who asked them or very often here in the threads sometimes with answers ..... sometimes with more questions.
huwyngr wrote:Mike
Pacel32 said << The actual back-up is around 900 GB. >>
Isn't that what he is concerned about? How can that be?
How could it be? - That could arise by N360 putting 20 x 43.7 GB backups one on top of the other. I have never had it that bad but I think I have seen others with it roughly that bad and I have had backup files reach 5 times the size of the actual backup before I have removed them and started again..... However a further post from Parcel32 is leading me to believe that all may not be as I suspected but I will reply to his post separately.
Parcel32 wrote:
Hello again Parcel32.
Thanks for that post it is most informative, you have lots of things on your drive that are not Norton backup. The Norton backup is all in the folder N360_BACKUP. Apart from the two files ARestore.exe and Arestore.loc I do not think that any of the other files are anything to do with N360 backups but some or all may be something to do with other backups.
How large is the N360_BACKUP folder? It would also be useful to know how large the other folders are.
The icon to the left of the top line, ANTHONY-HP which claims to be a "File folder", looks odd. Do you know what it is, how large it is or what is in it?
You mention that you have another drive. How large is that, and how much free space is there on that?
That's why I asked .... He may have misplaced a decimal or something may be reporting wrongly.
huwyngr wrote:That's why I asked .... He may have misplaced a decimal or something may be reporting wrongly.
True. And always good to check when you can, which is why I suggested other lines, but maybe not enough.. 
I think i did the right thing here, I put a new backup on my little harddrive because there was enough room, the preview said it was 44gigs. That fits. Then i switched the BU location back to the bigger hardrive with the original BU, after deleting the windows image backup & ANTHONY-HP. The wierd thing is that the original BU is still bigger than the preview, it's at 288gigs which is larger than what's on my hardrive.
Just to see what would happen i ran the BU again, and it added another 15gigs, where is this coming from?
Should i ditch the 303gig back-up and use the 44gig one instead?
Hello again Parcel32.
I hope you did not think that I was telling you to delete the windows image backup and ANTHONY-HP! All I asked was how big were they and what was in the latter...
However, you now appear to have two backups which is good. May I suggest that you do not do anything else at the moment as you may be able to provide useful data for the N360 team to track down this problem but I doubt I will be able to get any directions from them now, until next week (I believe that they unlike foolish volunteers, take the weekend off).
If you are happy to wait for a few days then I suggest that you go to Manage Backup Sets, select the "When" tab and set the timing to manual. I assume that it is currently set to automatic but confirmation would be helpful. With it set to manual you can know exactly when the backup is attempting to run and what else is happening at the time.
Now that you have cleared out the two directories and run the new backup. How much free space remains on your external drive (the 1 TB one)?
As to why the backup continues to grow - well as I said, I do not know but I know that sometimes it does.
Which backup should you use? - Presumably you do not need either at the moment but I would leave the two as they are for now until I can find out if there is anything that the team would like you to try.
Does that make sense? Are you happy to try holding off on any new backups for a few days?
I look forward to hearing how much free space you now have.
Thanks,
Right now the 1tb drive has 434gigs free. I didn't delete those items because i thought you were telling me too. I think they were from some windows utility i used before Norton took over. To be honest i think windows was still backing up along with norton. The windows back-up was also screwed up because it was around 600gigs.
The Norton360 was on automatic, now manual. I also unscheduled the windows one.
At this point i want to start from scratch and have it set up right to begin with.
Hi Parcel32.
That fine, now you have a backup on the separate drive and over 400 GB free on the main backup drive we can start again with no difficulty but would you mind waiting a while to see if the Norton team can use your case to find out what appears to have caused this growth of the backup file? I know that it was no where near as bad as you first thought but it is still pretty big!
If you do not want to wait I will still gladly advise you on how to clear up and start again.
Are you content to wait a while?
That’s fine, i can wait.