Updating an archive that is located on a second internal hard drive, the source being the Primary snapshot, takes but a few minutes. My question is...how do you update an archive located on an external hard drive, the source being the Primary snapshot? Edit: found it. Tools, Options, Archives tab, alternative archive locations.
Note: every so often you will want to delete that archive and re-create it fresh. Archives do not get defragged and the time to finalize can get very long as the Archive continues to get bigger even if your Primary remains the same size: nothing gets deleted from the Archive even if that file it no longer included or a part of it. Snapshots are not a problem, they get defragged whenever you defrag your hard drive even if you are not in that particular Snapshot at that time (at least that's what Raxco told me) but Archives do not get defragged no matter where they are and need to be recreated after a while: they constantly keep getting bigger and bigger and you will see that in the "Unused Space in Archive". Acadia
YW, Tony, you will notice that a newly re-created Archive gets finalized almost instantly, no dead space. Acadia
Yeah i knew that it slowed down when finalizing after updating it numerous times, but i never realised that the archive actually got bigger with unused space.
I just updated (1st update for this particular one) an archive and it said there is 150Mb of unused space yet it copied 2.5GB and only deleted .5GB. Where'd the unused space come from? Seems to me an update should wind up the same as the source. Finalizing took about 20 seconds. I've been deleting archives after about 5 updates. How often you do it? Is there a certain percentage of unused space when it's time to start a new archive?
Generally these types of data base files, grow when you add files and there isn't enough room, but when you delete files, they don't shrink. Since I update archives very frequently doing it after 5 updates would be to much. What I do is observe how long the finalizing time is. When it hits two minutes, I delete the archive and build a new one. Usually about every 4-6 weeks. Pete