Is consolidation really that slow

I have TI Home 2009, build 9646.
I've created a task to make a backup every day, and retain for 7 days. The first full backup took 2 hours, no problem, I understand a full backup can take some time. The full backup is 120 Gb on a external USB drive.
During 7 days backups are made rather fast, but after 7 days, the software starts to consolidate.
Now my computer is busy for about 4 hours to make one backup and perform consolidation. and it looks lik it is doing this every day now.

I want to make a daily backup, but this is almost unworkable when consolidation takes this long. A daily full backup is twice as fast!
Is this normal, or do I have a problem?


Thanks.

 

This is normal which is why I only use consolidation as a last resort. You can try doing incremental backups with a full every 7 days and check remove old archives.

 

My experience is similar. I only do full backups as this is quicker on my setup than messing about with consolidation.

 

Consolidatin is great in concept but something of Rube Goldberg device in practice.

Consolidation takes as long as making the Full and then some, plus the time to make the last inc/diff file if that's what triggered the consolidation. It doesn't do much to save file space; it basically reduces the number of files. If you make only a few incs/diffs before consolidation, then the total backup time for all the files could be greater than jsut doing full backups. If you find incs/diffs helpful and have the time to spare and make lots of incs before you consolidate, then doing inc/diff backups with consolidation can be helpful for reduced backup times on those occasions when the consolidations aren't occurring.

 

Hello Umarov,

Thank you for your interesting in Acronis True Image

Can you please download the latest build of Acronis True Image Home 2009 (9709) from your account (My Account -> Registered Products) and test it first.

If you have any technical issue or presales question contact Acronis support and submit technical request using this link or contact us via Live Chat

Best regards,
--
Dmitry Nikolaev

 

I fear you insult Mr. Goldberg with a comparison to Acronis consolidation.

The folks at Acronis gave me a description of the internal mechanics of consolidation. Perhaps I was a systems programmer for too long, but the obvious flaws in the design makes me believe that the Acronis systems architect was a drug abuser (I'm assuming he was fired for gross incompetency).

During consolidations all data in the chain is copied. Yes, copied. So if you have 14 days of files in a chain, odds are 14 days worth of data is touched if not duplicated and repackaged.

Funny, you would think the developers at Acronis would understand the principles of indexing.

Here's an example of how poor your Acronis backup consolidation can be. On the main machine here, we have 33GB in an incremental backup chain head (i.e., full backup). Daily incrementals over a week long span are between 2-100MB (not a lot of data). Total disk space on the incremental chain is less than 34GB on a eSATA drive.

Consolidation takes just under 10 hours. Here are the key lines from last nights incremental backup:

5 Information 4/18/2009 10:54:52 PM Consolidate Backup Archive Location: "J:\bkup\hp1\Inc8.tib" Destination: "J:\bkup\hp1\Inc8_58063A20-6542-4567-8600-68046E08B8B3.tib"
6 Information 4/19/2009 8:21:22 AM Operation has succeeded.

So for anyone scanning this forum in pre-purchase investigations, I suggest running far away from Acronis.

 

I remember Consolidation being proposed in the wish list long ago.

That is one of the problems of making wishes....Sometimes they become true.

In the broader scheme of things I will stick with full backups. So much more simple with predictable times for backups and restores.

Xpilot

 

I use Vembu remote backup as well as Acronis. They just also did this whole upgrade thing to give CONSOLIDATION as a new feature as well. I can only imagine the knots it will tie up the backup server in. I tried it with Acronis, whic is LOCAL and the time used/wasted was nothing short of phenomenal.

Why do backup companies think this is a good idea? I agree with above poster who thought programmer was on drugs.

It is useless, and takes way too much server time, and i am not techie, but I bet is lowers reliabilty as well. ie the more times a file is copied and re-written, the more possibility for corruption, and that is the ENEMY of backups, yes? Dave

 

Been using TI since v9, tbh the versions have had nothing but issues all along the way, why not fix the damn version before releasing another one, 2009 is a joke tbh, has issues aswell that updates dont resolve, you cant even set the number of full backups to have before deleting the 1st if you get me, that was invaluable, the incremental & differential options are useless & with this consolidation option is terrible, takes forever, so seems at end of day Acronis will not fix well known issues even in new versions, will remove great features & add crap ones, way to go Acronis, time to find another system to use.

 

Yes, I had consolidation set to true, and for some reason on my first time backup it decided to consolidate even though my 600mb threashold for a backup hadn't been reached. And it filled up the disk and didn't finish. Now I've turned off consolidation.