Advice for people installing Norton 360 - Ref: Backup function

Hurdler

Hello all - after installing Norton 360 on my home PC (it came free with a laptop and as it covers upto 3 PCs on a single licence, I thought... why not!), I cleared up my disc space on my PC and had about 25GB free (not that much, I know...).
Then today I heard the PC bleating and suddenly my entire hard drive was full - about 15MB left.

The only thing I've noticed with Norton 360 is that it often needs to have the PC rebooted for its PC Security updates - although it never gives any details as to what these changes are and what they affect!

I have recently also deleted a load of unused programs as well in a bid to free up space.

Any ideas?

EDIT: See my additional post - the Backup function actually initially backs up to the C drive and will go ahead and perform a back up of everything to itself - and THAT'S what chewed up the space.
If you have other means for backing up - DISABLE this function!

ormus

its possible your pc has been hijacked as a bot.
ive seen one pc bot, with over a million email addys on it!

sco0ter

You could try this small prog to see what/where the space has gone

http://www.fileheap.com/download-where-d-my-space-go-35096.html

free for 10 uses then you have to pay.

fwor

If the problem occurred immediately after installing Norton 360 then I would suspect that Norton failed to install properly and is logging large numbers of error messages somewhere.

If you can get hold of a graphic disk usage tool (I guess this is what fileheap is like as in previous post), have a look and see where the disk space is being used. Hopefully you'll find a folder associated with Norton that has loads of logfiles in it.

Or... you could just try uninstalling Norton temporarily and see if the problem goes away.

sidthesexist

If you uninstal norton i believe there is a official removal tool on their site somewhere, if you dont use this i believe it leave all sorts of entries in the registry?

Hurdler

I think the issue is resolved in that 360 "reserves" space to perform its back up function - and then waits until the PC isn't doing anything and backs itself up!!!

As I have a separate 400GB HD for my abundance of MP4 files - I have now disabled this function ... and hopefully that solves it.

BUT - ref: Removal tool - I used that as instructed, and when I first installed 360, it prompted me to remove it again using Add/Remove from the Control Panel - hence the chat with customer services - where I had to complete the Control Panel removal and then proceed again with the install (which went in perfectly)...

I'll keep an eye on this - initially I thought that 360 was indeed less bloated than Internet Security (which incessentaly created new rules every 5 minutes for pretty much everything!)... If I find any more issues - I'll post to here for any interested MSE folks!