Consolidation Process Hanging

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!

- Log in to post comments

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.

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!
- Log in to post comments