Review of Norton Online Backup service backup and data storage

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Norton Online Backup helps you secure documents, photos, music, and any other data on all your home computers. According to the conditions of use, there can be up to five pieces. Agree, this is enough to protect important data for all family members. The only limitation can be disk space, of which 25GB are allocated under the terms of one license. But if you wish, you can purchase additional disk space in online storage. The cost of an annual subscription to Norton Online Backup is only RUB 1,749.

Main features of the service:

• automatic (scheduled) backup of data to online storage;
• access to backups and restore data if necessary from a special web interface;
• manage all backups from a special web interface;
• backup open files.

Windows Vista

• Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate, Business
• Starter Edition
• All SP
• 32 and 64 bit

Windows XP

• Professional, Home, Media Center
• SP2 and higher
• 32-bit only

Internet browsers

• Microsoft Internet Explorer® version 6.0 and higher
• Firefox version 2.0 and higher
• Safari version 3.0 and higher

Screen resolution:

• no less than 800x480

After registering and paying for a subscription to Norton Online Backup in the Symantec online store, you need to install a small agent program (2.27 MB) on the computers from which information needs to be protected. It provides communication between your computers and remote online storage.

Figure 1: Installing Norton Online Backup Agent Software

After this, a yellow Norton Online Baclup icon will appear in the system tray. That's all local settings are ending.

Figure 2: Norton Online Backup system tray icon

Norton Online Backup is fully customizable from a special web interface, which will be discussed below.

Login to the web interface to manage the service is done by double-clicking on the Norton Online Backup icon in the system tray or directly through the website https://nobu.backup.com/

Figure 3: Logging into the Norton Online Backup web interface

Home page service shows a list of all your computers connected to the service (on which the Norton Online Backup agent program is installed). For each computer, the dates of the last backup are displayed, individual links to manual start backup or restore procedures, as well as a link to settings. Icons of protected computers can be changed for user convenience.

Figure 4: Norton Online Backup web interface home page

Figure 5: Backup process running in Norton Online Backup

Backup settings in Norton Online Backup are extremely simple and intuitive - a proprietary feature software under the Norton brand. You just need to specify which categories of information need backups and set a schedule for their creation.

In addition to standard Windows folders (My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, etc.) and data types (Internet bookmarks, contacts or mail), you can specify arbitrary folders or even separate files, for which you need to make a backup. You can configure the backup to run automatically, scheduled, or manually. In general, all the settings are almost identical to those in the flagship product Norton 360, and are already familiar to many.

Figure 6: Backup settings in Norton Online Backup

Norton Online Backup keeps its own records of events for each protected computer. The user can always check whether the backup procedure was completed successfully or whether a failure occurred during the process for some reason.

Figure 7: Event Report in Norton Online Backup

If important data is damaged or lost, it can be quickly restored. Norton Online Backup has two options for this. The first of them provides automatic recovery data, with the ability to overwrite a damaged copy.

Figure 8: Restoring data from a backup in Norton Online Backup

The second option is manual data recovery through a simple download. necessary files. In this case, you can download either a file separately or a selective set of files.

Figure 9: Manually copying data from a backup to Norton Online Backup

It is important to note that the Norton Online Backup service is completely implemented in Russian. The interface language is determined automatically depending on the version of Windows.

• ease of connection and configuration;
• the ability to backup data from five computers at once with individual settings for each;
• access to backups via a web interface from any computer;
• the ability to configure the channel load when taking a backup copy of data;
• strong encryption and compression backup copies data in online storage;
• incremental block-level backup;
• the ability to automatically or manually restore data from a backup if necessary.

• does not work without an Internet connection;
• duration of backup of large volumes of data at low network connection speed;
• termination of the service 1 month after the end of the subscription.

Norton Online Backup (Symantec) is a program that positions itself as a service for saving your documents, but not somewhere out there... but in the real cloud, that is, on the Internet on Symantec servers. The files will be encrypted for security.

Under the terms of one license, you can secure your files on five computers, this is of course more than enough, but there is another problem - this is the place. It was 25 GB, it may have changed now, in any case, if you want more, it will cost additional money.

The process of creating copies is automatic, and the copies will be immediately placed in online storage. To understand how useful this program can be, imagine that you have a flight hard drive... You can easily restore all your data! Of course, for normal operation You need a pretty good Internet, I think 10 megabits at least! There is also a useful option to offload the channel so that it is not completely clogged by the backup process.

Another advantage of the Norton Online Backup service is that your data can be accessed from any computer that is connected to the Internet. Connection with personal account passes through the secure https protocol. You can not only control the process of creating backups, but also exchange files between Windows and Mac, for example, but again, for everything to work comfortably, you need fast Internet!

An important feature of the Norton Online Backup service is incremental backup, which occurs at the block level.

Login to your personal account:

Home page - this displays a list of computers that are connected to the Norton Online Backup service (or on which the client program is installed). If you wish, you can change the icons; the date of the last backup (that is, the backup was created) is displayed for each computer, as well as links to start a restore or create a new backup:

Backup in progress:

The settings are conveniently grouped - you can specify what exactly needs to be backed up in addition to standard folders My documents are separate files, folders. The scheduler allows you to specify exactly how you want to create backups - automatically, scheduled or manually, however, Norton Online Backup has a lot in common with the flagship product Norton 360:

Report on the copying process. Here, each computer keeps its own event log, you can easily see if everything went fine on a particular computer:

Restoring data from a Norton Online Backup backup, there are two options, or use automatic recovery with the ability to overwrite damaged data:

Or manually, here you are offered to download one or more files:

An interesting point - backups take place over the network, this is already clear... That is, in the future it may actually become better than the old fashioned way: making a backup on another hard drive or on external media. Especially if you also consider that in both cases the files are additionally compressed and, as a result, weigh less. If Internet technologies reach the point where in the future every home will have a package of at least 50 megabits, then this type of backup will become really convenient.

Moreover, Norton is not some kind of sharashka office, but a completely decent company that has experience in providing security.

What's another plus? It even works on XP, despite the fact that it’s already 2016. But not everything is so smooth, after the Chrome browser warned that it will soon not support the beloved XP by many, then Norton may do the same any day.

If we also take into account easy setup, when you set it up once and that’s it, it works like a clock, then we can conclude that this service Norton Online Backup is worth trying as an alternative to a dedicated hard drive for backup. Well, now you know what kind of Norton Online Backup program this is, and if you have important data on your computer, then think about it - maybe it’s worth taking a closer look at it and using it? Good luck