Customer had been using Norton Backup to backup her laptop to an external USB hard drive.

In theory, a very sensible idea, except for the norton part…

She needed to send the laptop for a warranty repair, and the shop had “forgotten” to remove the hard drive…

In the meantime, she had gotten a replacement laptop, and needed to recover her accounting data from the external hard drive…

It turns out that she assumed that Norton would backup everything… but wasn’t familiar using Norton to restore the data.

This is where I have a few issues with “commercial” backup programs (this is not just limited to norton).

The first issue is that backup programs will generate a backup file with all the backup data within the file. This forces you to use the original program to restore the data. I can understand the historical origins of this form of backup.

This is OK for a large company, but is utter crap for non-technical users. Take a look at syncback to see an example of great backup software. You can take a syncback backup to virtually any PC, and copy back any files you want, without needing to use any special software (just your standard windows explorer).

The second issue with Norton backup, is the default settings. By default, it appears that only “important” files are backed up… ie most of my documents, plus a few other selective windows files. Since MYOB stores its data (and its own backup data) in non-standard places on the drive, then Norton did not backup any MYOB data… Given the size of external drives nowadays, Norton probably should default to backing up everything, and prompt the user, if there isn’t enough space.

Needless to say, There was no data for me to restore (except for a few photos).

Now the customer hopes that the repair shop doesn’t wipe her hard drive… But from past experience, repair shops are notoriously careless with customer data… usually because the work is sub-contracted to the lowest bidder…

Oh well, fingers crossed.