Consolidation Process Hanging

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Warren Russell
Beginner
Posts: 1
Comments: 2

Hi,

I'm using True Image Home to consolidate several incremental backups and have set it up to save only the final version and delete the other. The process has hung with the Consolidation Process window showing the progress bar at about 10% finished an time remaining at 4 hours 6 minutes, and has been that way for a couple of hours now. Task Manager shows that the program is still running.

Can anybody tell me what causes this and what I can do to recover? If I close the consolidation window or (if that doesn't work) kill the program in Task Manager, will my backups be corrupted? Will I lose the ability to recover from that backup series?

Thanks for your help!

Mon, 10/08/2012 - 04:28
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James F
Forum Star
Posts: 46
Comments: 2760
#1

Warren,

The consolidation process can take a very long time based on the files to be consolidated. If you backup files are large, the consolidation time can be very, very, lenghtly, possibly many hours. The progress bar does not always reflect the time and progress properly. Did you let the consolidation finish, or did you abort it?

If you were consolidating the files to the original location, there is always the possiblity of the backup files being corrupted. The consolidation process should complete the new consolidated file creation, before deleting any of the files (if you had the original file deletion option selected) that are to be contained in the consolidated file, so you should not have any issues with the original files, if they still exist. Normally the original files are not modified, but are read from and written into a new file. Aborting the consolidation could possibly leave some temporary files in your backup destination folder though.

James

Mon, 10/08/2012 - 20:35
What I tell my friends: It's not a problem with your computer, it's a short circuit between the chair and the keyboard! What I tell my customers: Whatever the problem is, we can fix it.
Pat L
Forum Hero
Posts: 87
Comments: 9254
mvp
#2

To augment James comments, when ATI consolidates, it creates a temporary file where existing TIB files' information are concatenated/edited. This file will grow as large as the largest backup involved in the consolidation.
Therefore, make sure you have enough space on your backup disk.
Creating this file will take almost as much time as a corresponding original backup.
So be really patient.
If this file is created successfully, then ATI deletes the original files, rename the working file and the remaining file to have a consistent newly formed chain.

Because of all this overhead, we always recommend not to use consolidation. Instead use auto-cleaning:
- instruct ATi to create a new full backup after X slice,
- specify to keep only Y most recent chains.

Make sure you always have enough space to create one full on the disk after the Yth chain.

Mon, 10/08/2012 - 23:06

Win 10 Pro x64 SSD - ATI Latest build

Warren Russell
Beginner
Posts: 1
Comments: 2
#3

Thank you both for your replies. Interesting that you do not recommend consolidation....

James, I have not exited the process; I wanted to wait for any replies before I did anything. Unfortunately, more than 24 hours later, the situation hasn't changed. So it does look like I'm going to need to abandon the attempt and hope things are still ok.

Now that I understand the sequence better (thank you both for clarifying), I can see that this might be a space issue. If so, it would sure be nice to see an error message or a warning of some type before wasting all this time on it.

Cross your fingers for me!

Tue, 10/09/2012 - 01:11