Norton 360 File Restore kicked me in the shorts.

I use Norton 360, and there is some avoidable evil to this product that one should be cautious of.

I set up Norton 360 about 18 months ago to back up my Windows machine, where is have several user accounts under C:\Users. I instructed it to “Back up all file in C:”

Recently I my disk drive was a bit flakey (took several tries to reboot), so I was hyper vigilant in using backups. Dell had sent me a replacement drive gratis per warranty: good support.

I installed my new drive and ran “restore all”. For all users except one, all files were restored, including file edited earlier this week.

For one user (unfortunately most important user and files, like projects for work and income tax files), backups were not being taken since November 2010. So for this user, only some 80% of files where restored.

Norton support was dreadful. It was I who discovered all the clues about what was restored and from when. In fact for user INCOMPLETE, the dates in the files that were restored, all had the restore date and not the create/edit date.

The first support person could not wait for the restore that was going to take at least an hour. The second support person stated that I should be satisfied with the partial restore. When I asked (chat) the second support person if he would depend on a product that restored 90% of this files, he said “yes and I do”. Seriously? What about you, the reader?

I then got a call from their support, asking if I was satisfied. The person just kept repeating “to back up files, you must specify which files to back up”. She said this three times, so I thanked her and said it was time to terminate the call.

I need to recover work that was done for the company I contract for; I hope I don't need to do too much unpaid redo work I cannot afford to do this.

I need to redo my income taxes, or get a transcript of my filings, so I can pick up again next year. I have no hard copy should I get audited. I will try to contact Turbo tax to see if they have a copy from my efile.

I have lost my recent history of financial portfolio history, where I was keeping recent updates to measure performance.

I will see what I can do with Quicken and recovering this years trades for next years income tax.

Yes: all of these are example of why one should do backups. I was doing backups. I was depending on a product called Norton 360 to do these backups.

I wish I had a copy of the chat session. It was quite unbelievable. A perfect demonstration of out-sourcing to the lowest bidder (and least competent). I guess I get what I paid for when I only paid $100 or so for a backup product?

Here is one lesson. Do not trust your backup software, no matter who the company is. Perhaps even I did something to the config to cause backups for one user to cease. (I wish someone could explain).

Do the following task to check up on your backups. Set up a reminder every six months (or whatever you are willing to dare). Rename an important file and try to restore the original file name.