# Ability to schedule compacting separately

**URL:** <https://forum.duplicati.com/t/ability-to-schedule-compacting-separately/10674>\
**Category:** Features\
**Tags:** ux\
**Created:** [September 5, 2020, 7:03am UTC](https://forum.duplicati.com/t/ability-to-schedule-compacting-separately/10674 "2020-09-05T07:03:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![amloessb](https://forum.duplicati.com/user_avatar/forum.duplicati.com/amloessb/32/2259_2.png) [@amloessb](https://forum.duplicati.com/u/amloessb)\
**Post date:** [September 5, 2020, 7:03am UTC](https://forum.duplicati.com/t/ability-to-schedule-compacting-separately/10674/1 "2020-09-05T07:03:16Z")

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Recently, I noticed that the operation of just checking whether or not compacting was required was taking about 40% of the total backup time on one of my backup sets. I’d love to use the `--no-auto-compact` switch so it’s not needlessly doing this check every time, but I couldn’t find any other way to schedule a compacting operation (even though there’s a _Compact now_ button in the UI).

I’d love to see a way to schedule compacting separate from a backup set’s normal schedule. It could be time-based (e.g., every _N_ days) or frequency-based (every _N_ versions)–either would work.

Or maybe this feature already exists, and I’m just blind. 🙂

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**Author:** ![drwtsn32](https://forum.duplicati.com/user_avatar/forum.duplicati.com/drwtsn32/32/2591_2.png) [@drwtsn32](https://forum.duplicati.com/u/drwtsn32)\
**Post date:** [September 5, 2020, 11:01pm UTC](https://forum.duplicati.com/t/ability-to-schedule-compacting-separately/10674/2 "2020-09-05T23:01:57Z")

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Check out the [auto-compact-interval](https://duplicati.readthedocs.io/en/latest/06-advanced-options/#auto-compact-interval) option.

On my systems I have it set to 1 week and it’s working well.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![amloessb](https://forum.duplicati.com/user_avatar/forum.duplicati.com/amloessb/32/2259_2.png) [@amloessb](https://forum.duplicati.com/u/amloessb)\
**Post date:** [September 6, 2020, 8:08am UTC](https://forum.duplicati.com/t/ability-to-schedule-compacting-separately/10674/3 "2020-09-06T08:08:39Z")

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Nice! Don’t know how I missed that, but it’s exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the tip!