NSW

It doesn't stand for Norton System Works. It stands for Norton Seldom Works.

Here's the deal. After my little fiasco with FeedDemon the other day, I got to thinking. I'm backing up this file, but how the heck do I know that the backup is actually working? History is replete with people who thought they were backing up files, only to find... So I looked in Norton's Save and Restore - Recovery - Recover My Files menu to do a restore of the backups it was taking.

Well. First off, the menu they give you is gibberish. It asks you to tell it part or all of the name of the file you want to recover. I wasn't sure if they meant the file they'd created, or the file that was backed up into the file that they created. So I left that blank and just clicked on Search. A long time later, it gave a menu of files, sorted by file or folder name. So if there was a folder -- say, Extensions -- that was in two profiles for Firefox, and one for Thunderbird, you see all three. I'd have thought that it would make more sense to show the high level directories first, then the files in them, but fine.

So I sorted it by directory. The first thing I see is the My Documents files. This makes sense because I told it to back up My Pictures, and thats where they are. Having the carets around the file name isn't terribly helpful, because now it sorts out of alphabetical order, but, whatever. I scroll down and I see the C: root directory, and to the left of it, a series of folders. Bill Laptop. Okay, good. Documents and Settings. What? I didn't say to back that up! Well, in a way, I did -- because I'm backing up Application Data, and thats a sub-sub-sub folders of that high level. Sheesh. Fine. Then I see Python24. Now, I know I'm not backing up my Python directory, so I have no idea why its showing me this. Ditto a couple of other high-level directories.

Finally, I see Bill Images, which is a subdirectory of Bill Laptop, and its where I save images that I like. Its got some files in it, and two subdirectories. Lets see.... the backup rules say to take all files, including the subdirectories, and put them into C:/BACKUP/BACKUP BILL IMAGES. According to the backup report, it ran, and very quickly -- like, four seconds. This does not sound promising. I click on the BILL IMAGES entry. It pops up a message that its goingto display that file, and then I get a listing. It shows the two subfolders, then all of the files in all of the folders -- the root and the two subfolders. Each one shows the directory path to that file. So I think well, heck, maybe this thing is working. So I pick a file, and the Recover button lights. I click on it. And, four seconds later, I get this:

And if you click through to the Symantec site? It tells you a problem has occurred, and you should reinstall the product. Imagine if I actually needed that backup?

N. S. W.