Consolidation Issue
I have several incremental updates (as well as a full update). When I consolidate them it takes forever.....2 days for a hard drive totalling only 90 Gigabytes of data and programs etc. If I simply create a new FULL BACKUP it takes less than 2 hours! So my question is: why consolidate?
Thanks,
Oreally

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I have basically the exact same problem: Consolidation of backups takes approximately forever and then some days... :-/
Configuration:
Intel Core2 Quad, 2,4GHz, 4GB
Vista Ultimate 64 Bit
internal disks: 2x1TB SATA
external disk (backup destination): 1TB eSATA (delivers approx. 70MB/s sustained read/write)
Backup Settings: "incremental forever" (only doing daily incrementals), Backup is set to automatically consolidate after reaching 500GB of used space on the external drive. Daily Backups are in the 300-600MB range, sometimes spiking up to 13GB (the largest incremental I ever had measured 58GB).
3 days ago automatic consolidation kicked in for the first time, after the last incremental nudged the used space to approx. 502GB. The initial full backup consists of 298GB and there are currently 114 incrementals on top of that. The consolidation has not finished yet, meaning it has been running for 3 full days now(!!!). As far as I can see the external disk is continuously pumping about 30MB/s read *and* 30MB/s write, so it looks like it is really consolidating something. But that also means that the system had enough time (3 days, i.e. 72 hours) to move around (i.e. read *and* write) approx. 8 TERAbytes of data... Taking the measured throughput of my external drive (32MB/s simultaneous read/write) I would expect the consolidation of a single incremental (500MB) into the ~300GB full backup to take no more than 3 hours (completely reading and writing all the contained data). The consolidation of several incrementals into the full backup should also only take as long, as it takes to read and write all contained data *once* (That is it should not consolidate the first incremental into the full, and the start another consolidation from scratch consolidating the next incremental into the new full, but it should do this all at once, integrating several of the incrementals into the base backup at once).
What is it doing? Consolidation is completely unusable at this speed...
Any help seriously appreciated!
regards, Patrick
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I have mine set to just do full backups, you can set the amount and when that is reached it will delete the oldest one in time. In my case I have it set to do just two full backups before it deletes the oldest. I'm using TI 2009. My backups take around 40 minutes for a 100 gig. I soon kicked consolidation into touch when I realised how long it was taking. With the amount of backups you had I can well understand why it took so long.
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