Just tried out the Backup feature and this is what I thought.

Firstly, the initial setup is very easy. I'm sure that most computer novices would find it a breeze. I particularly liked the 'What', 'Where', 'When' layout.

Backups seem reasonably quick, and I like how you can set it to automatic which I assume backups when your computer is idle - a critical feature missing from a lot of Backup programs (and anti-virus suites for that matter) which always seem to start their automatic schedules when you're right in the middle of something, grinding your computer to an unwanted halt.


What I didn't like however is the following:

Not being able to specify where exactly on a drive the backup files are stored - i.e. you can choose to back up to the D: drive for example, but if you wanted to store them within a particular folder on that drive for some reason, there doesn't appear to be an option to do so. That is only a minor niggle, and I'm sure most people wouldn't care.

More critically however, and I believe this is crucial, when the files are backed up, they are saved into a totally different format which only Norton will be able to read. This does not provide any security advantage, as no password is set to encrypt the files, but, depending on circumstances, could make restoring the files a tedious task.

Now let’s say my primary hard drive fails, but Norton has backed up all my important documents onto a second drive, which I need immediate access to. I then plug my backup drive into another computer that may be running a totally different security suite. How am I supposed to access my files?! Am I expected to uninstall whichever security suite is installed, then install Norton, copy my files over, uninstall Norton, re-install original security suite, then manually copy back all my files (which would have since been modified) onto the hard drive so they can be restored to the original PC once the hard drive has been replaced (that is assuming my secondary PC actually runs Windows). THIS IS NOT WHAT PEOPLE WANT! The backup files should be saved in their original format so that any computer can browse through the folders simply using Windows Explorer (or even Linux / OS X).

The whole process to me seems like a ploy by Norton to force people into installing their product to enable them to read / restore their backed up files, knowing that once somebody has installed it, they are more likely to stick with it!

So in conclusion, a very good backup suite, ruined by the fact that the backed up files can only be read by a computer running Norton.