Does anyone put a limit on the amount of times you would update an archive before creating a new one?
Yes, but it's not based on number of times. The archives have certain database type characteristics. For example if you were to add 1gb of data to your drive and then update the archive it would grow by 1gb. Then delete the 1gb of data and update the archive, deleting it from the archive. But the archive file would stay the same size. That causes some restructuring which probably why you see the "finalizing" time at the end. If you notice on a newly created archive, the time "finalizing" is only a few seconds. But over time it grows. When the "finalizing" time reaches a few minutes, I then delete the archive and rebuild it. Pete
thats correct over time it become ever more fragmented,IMO creating a new one is better then defrag the file as it would take ages to finish.
Oh that. Defragging would be a waste of time. It's a compressed archive type of file, and I thing windows deliberately leaves space. Pete
A few minutes? Never noticed such a long time but then it's true, most of my archives have only been updated a few times. Despite what you said initially, can you provide a figure of how many times you updated to reach a few minutes? Just a rough guess
I can confirm what Peter said about the 'finalizing' of the archives going into minutes. I update one in particular a lot being a beta tester, so that I had a current build archived if my hard drive had problems. (fortunatly hasn't happened) Have just deleted the archive and made a new one so I didn't have to wait so long for the final croak. Peter with all he does in the testing arena will have to rebuild his much more frequently than I ever would. Apparently the 'finalizing' wait is not a symptom of a problem within the archive.
First no the finalizing wait is not a symtom of problems in the archive, just that as you add and delete the structure internally changes. I probably on average update my archive at least daily, if not moreso. Initially this finalizing time may be 10 seconds on a new archive, but after a month it can be up to 2 or 3 minutes. I've never had a problem with this and sometimes I've gone several months. But that time does creep up and can get larger than the update time itself. If you only update once a week or so, it's not a big deal. Pete
i can confirm that,finalising take longer with freqently updated archives as time goes by,i would guess it something to do with fragmenting. If you defrag your system and then update archive,there's a difference in fileplacement so i guess finalising is a kinda sorting to get the data more contiguous ?? At the copy/update process there's also a lot of replacing data[not removing].what this exactly means no clue but maybe everything is interrelated ?? Or my guessing is completely wrong !??!
no your right. Data is getting replace inside the archive which fragments it internally, or something like that.
It isn't fragmentation at the cluster level (disk fragmentation) but fragmentation at the data level, typical behaviour of a database. It's something akin to Registry fragmentation, since the Registry is also a database.