consolidation confusion

I can't get consolidation to work. I have read lots of forum posts, over about 18 months!!

Firstly I have ATIH 2009. If I have to upgrade to get consolidation working the way I want it to, then I will.

When I bought ATIH I thought it would be the answer to my backup needs. I have tried several times to configure it, and I have it making a full backup then a daily incremental and have set it up to switch the PC off when finished.

I have about 490gb of data on an internal one Terrabyte drive. The operating system, XP Pro is on a separate partition and currently is not backed up.

I have a separate one terrabyte internal drive purely for backups.

I would like to set ATIH up to make incremental backups and consolidate once a week.

I recently tried again to do this and the one terrabyte drive was showing full after about 2-3 weeks. I couldn't work out what the files were and if any of them could be deleted.

It takes about 40hrs to make the initial full backup. I don't want to do that every week, surely the incremental backups can be consolidated to a central file?

As a short term solution I bought a one terrabyte portable drive and I make a full copy of all the files to it once a month, and have ATIH set to make daily incremental backups to the internal drive. At the end of the month I make a new copy to the external drive and wipe the internal drive, and then start the process off again, with the 40 hour intial full ATIH backup and daily incrementals.

BTW copying all the date to the external drive is quicker than ATIH full backup, I assume because of the compression.

Hope I have explained my problem and that someone can help me understand how to set up ATIH properly.

thanks

Rob