Consolidation failing
I have all of my discrete file backups (music, photos, videos, docs etc.) set to store 3 versions each, with auto consolidation set - when I get to having 4 versions, the consolidation process runs automatically - then just hangs. Have left a 32gb backup of Photos on "consolidating" for 24 hours and still no progress.
Am running on Windows 8.1.
Anyone else having same issues? Thanks,

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Consolidation, which amounts to a backup of several backups, is problematic in TI 2014. It seems especially so when run under Win 8. I believe that most of the issues involve data compression. It appears that if consolidation occurs on backup data that has used Acronis compression on data that has already been compressed by some other method then consolidation fails. If backups created using TI were done without compression so that consolidation did not have to deal with this "DOUBLE" compression, the consolidation itself would run successfully more often than not.
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Rather than use any consolidation settings, my preference is to use a custom backup scheme with "automatic cleanup" with options "store no more than X recent version chains."
Automatic cleanup does not begin cleanup until the program reaches the desired number of CHAINS to be retained and from that point forward, create a new full backup and deletes the oldest chain. This maintains a revolving set of backup chains.
Depending upon whether your backup type is "full only", or "Full plus incremental", or "Full polus differential", check out signature link 2 below and review illustrations 11-Full, or 11-Inc, or 11-Dif and setup your backup scheme as per one of those examples--except change the 6 and 4 examples to fit your own storage capacity.
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Thanks Bob & Grover H
I'm still baffled though - where are these "Consolidation settings" that I'm supposed to avoid?
In the illustrations in figure 11, there are two "Avoid" points, but nothing about "Consolidation"
Rob
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Here are a couple examples of what I avoid.
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Thank you GroverH
I did not realise that "consolidation" only applied to "incremental" and "differential" back-ups".
I presume that means Acronis is trying to group the different back-ups together into one file?
Anyway, for some reason Acronis was also trying to consolidate my "full" back-up files with an earlier backup, but could not find the earlier file because it had been deleted and/or the removable disc changed for a different one. Of course the program was then sending me "Backup Task execution failed" messages. Even after reading all your steps I don't know why that happened.
However, since I have deleted that task and started a new one following your steps, it seems to work without a problem. Fingers crossed!
Thanks so very much - another grateful reader of your kind work.
(And a big raspberry to Acronis who have managed to downgrade their program so that the 2014 version is full of bugs and has a terrible user interface and yet they fail to provide more than one month's free support. Quite disgraceful!)
Rob
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