Norton Save & Restore - Issue

[exstle123]

Here's a post for all those Norton Save & Restore customers out there. I feel this is a pretty large defect in the program. I emailed this exact text to Symantec Customer email support. Their support is basically just horrible. Their response to my issue was:

"Peter, please accept my apologies, as I am unable to comprehend the exact issue from the information you have provided. In order to provide precise customer support, we need to gather more information from you. By obtaining these details, we will have a better chance of making a specific diagnosis and leading you to the best solution. Please reply to this email with the following information..." followed by the standard canned things they ask any customer for.

Followups to this email resulted in:

"Hello Peter, We apologize if you did not receive a response to your last email; we have not had any emails held over un-responded to, but we hope perhaps a response did not properly transmit." (what does that mean?!?) and them ultimately closing the issue.

here was the original text I typed ...

"(running latest version Version: 11.01    Build: 12312)

I setup Norton Save and Restore to backup specific folders from my D: drive to a network share. Ran the backup, it worked and created a bunch of folders/files on the network share. Afterward I could search through my archives using the Norton recovery tool, and recover files etc just fine.

So then I decided I would manually delete the archive files themselves on the network share. I did this because I wanted to do things over differently and start from scratch.

So then I go into Norton Save and Restore and delete the backup entry and the schedule itself. So that this point, the tool doesn't have any backups defined.

So at this point, I create another backup entry, specify the same folder names from D: and instruct the tool to backup to the same network share location. It proceeds to do some activity and then says the backup has completed successfully. Out of curiousity I look at the network share and there are no files there whatsoever. It's still empty from when I deleted it earlier.

Somehow the tool thinks that the backup was already done, no files have been added/deleted from D: so there's nothing to actually do.

I figured out something... I believe Norton Save & Restore is looking in a file named "catalog.dat" in c:\Documents and Settings\all users\Application Data\symantec\FileBackup. It must store what files it thinks it backed up previously there. So on subsequent backups, it cross-refs the backup files with catalog.dat to know what has changed. Well, if you manually delete the actual archives, the program doesn't bother to check that. It assumes the backup archives are still out there, and only refers to "catalog.dat" to see what has changed from the last backup. This is a bug in my opinion. The program should be smart enough to know the archive files themselves are not present!!

I even tried naming the newly created backup to a different name than the original one. Nope, still the program thinks the files were backed up originally when of course I wiped out the archives manually.

Now then I decided to delete "catalog.dat" - would that do something? Yes. You have to shutdown the Save&Restore service via services.msc to do it. Once you restart the service and do the backup again, it then of course realizes the files should be backed up.

I'm a bit disappointed at this point. I feel the program should be able to detect the archive files were deleted. Otherwise the program will falsely report files were backed up when they were not. This is pretty serious flaw.  I would appreciate any feedback you have in regards to this issue. Thank you."

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Another complaint altogether is how if you utilize file/folder level backups to a network share, if your hard drive dies completely, using the Recovery CD does NOT allow you to recover these files/folders. It only supports the Disk imaging (recovery points). Yikes. My experiments failed in re-setting up the backups the same once Windows is reinstalled - it does not recognize the previously saved backups and allow you to search/recover files. The file/folder backups are stored in some propriatary archive file format which of course doesn't help matters. Moral of the story is, use image based backups (recovery points) to a network drive if you want to recover data after a serious hard drive failure.  They can create an Explorer for image recovery points, why not an explorer for file/folder backup archives??