Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of webinformant.tv, I am David Strum, your host and reviewer. Today we look at Symantec protection network and its online back up service. It is for a variety of windows PC’s and makes off sites backups easier making copies of your files that are stored on their servers over the internet. Why bother with this? Several reasons, if you ever had your laptop stolen like I have you will need this to fall back on. Second, the best back ups are once that you do not have to remember to do and this is pretty much set and forget. Finally, it is not very costly and only requires a reasonably fast internet connection to work.

We are looking at the home log in page of NCC and you will there are three different services offered. Straight on line backup a separate version that works for windows server based back up exec software. You can sign up for both for a month of free servers and that will entitle you to ten gigs of storage for each. Once the trial is done, this will cost you $10.00 a piece per month, for the basic service and there is also a beta service for online remote access. Once you have registered and logged in, you start out by clicking on add a computer and registering a new machine, downloading the installer agent and then running in the desktop you want to protect. The service will send you a confirmation email to verify your intentions. Once that is done you go into “my services” screen, click on the backup link here next to the computer that you want to start backing up. You are then browsing your files system and can select the collection of files for your first back up.

To make sure that things are working, I suggest just picking a couple of small files to see if they get copied to the service. We click on the plus signs to expand the directory tree and click on the files or directories we are interested in, that is really all there is to it. You can also select schedules to start backups in off hours so they do not tie up your internet connection or when you are actively using your PC by clicking here on the set schedule link on the left. If you do this, you should also set your PC power options so your system does not go to sleep at night and you can continue to do the backups as shown here in this control panel.

You can monitor what has been backed up and what is in progress on this screen by going to the link on the computer profile and you can see what jobs have been completed and other details. You can also monitor what is going on from your desktop by bringing up this screen from your taskbar and shows more status information. What about the more important process? Restoring deleted files, we go to the online backup services and click on the restore link on the right and it will walk you through the process on what files and where to put them on your computer. You can either search for particular file by name or use the browser to walk through your file system.

Where as some of the other things I like, Symantec offers a premium service where they will store your file history for up to seven years. There are not too many companies that can make good on that kind of guarantee, this means if you delete something you can go back in time to find a copy to recover it. Speaking of recovering things, Symantec also has an arrangement with NCC group where they will store your pass phrase independently of your backups should you need to recover that. The service is free of charge as long as you have an SPN account.

Also you should know that Symantec has big plans for its SPN service and will be adding other service overtime. Given this humungous product portfolio, this is clearly a place to watch. What are some of the things I did not like? For one thing, you do not want to run this on a slow internet connection. I was using a cable modem with a 300 kilobit uploads and it still took about two minutes per megabyte of data that I was backing up. The more files you have, the longer it will take and files that are in gigabytes or more in size will take hours or even days. You might