Automatic consolidation ATI Home 2010
I am totally puzzled by the whole consolidation thing. I have a simple task the creates an incremental image backup every week of my system drive. I am backing up to an external 500GB Hard drive. I am set automatic consolidation to trigger at 200GB.
My issues is that when the consolidation kicks in, it takes ages (nearly 24hrs last time!) and all I am left with is a nearly full drive containing the original archives and several new strangely named files. What I am supposed to do now? The help file suggests the old archives should be deleted but this doesn't seem to happen.
build 7046.
Yes the consolidation is part of the backup task.
The strangely named files you see are probably left overs from a failed operation. They have names like 3BAE43AE-5848-4AD3-913C-2AB947915CE8... these can be safely be deleted if they are in the backup folder. One issue with the consolidation at this time is that if you change (for any reason) the settings of a task it will kick off a new backup sequence and any backups taken before the time of the edit seem to be excluded from the consolidation task and have to be managed manually. You can do this by going to the recovery section and then selecting a backup file to consolidate by right clicking and selecting "consolidate".
Remember the the checkboxes you see are for the files you want to *keep* so if you do not want to loose all the incrementals for a full backup select the ones you want to keep.
It is also possible that one of the incrementals is corrupt or that ATIH2010 cannot find one of them which could cause those strangely named files to be left. Have you looked at the logs to see what the failure was. A consolidation failure will not show up as a red day on the dashboard IIRC as it is not an error only a warning.
How big are you full backup files? 24 hours sounds a long time but you say an external drive but not what connection it is or speed e.g. USB v1.1 or v2.0. Remember that the external drive is going to have to read all the data and write out a new file to the same disk for each consolidation pass and there may be more than one depending on the result of the previous pass i.e. is the space occupied still larger than the specified limit.
Not sure if the above helps and apart from the above there is not much that can be done at this time. There are some issues that are known about but when they will be fixed, I suspect, will be some months away.
You may want to validate the backups you have to ensure that they are valid - this would take some time but may also shed some light on the issue if any fail to validate. Try this before you try to consolidate anything manually.
Thanks for the suggestions. It seems to me that the consolidation feature just doesn't seem to work well (given all the issues raised on this forum). I've started to use Chain2Gen and this does what I need.