Question while I try my Google-fu

[Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife]

We have a couple of new file servers, and someone checked the box at the root of the drive, to “Compress this drive to save disk space”.

 

We’ve never used that before, so were surprised when it was checked.  The question:  what happens if I uncheck that box now?  Will all the files bloat back to actual size?  Is the size being reported now incorrect because the file is compressed? Does it hurt anything to have that checked?   We used to do deduplication but stopped that because size reporting was completely off.  Thanks for any answers, tips, advice, etc.

 

Thanks,

 

Joe Heaton

Managed Services and Operational Support Unit

Information Technology Operations Branch

Data and Technology Division

CA Department of Fish and Wildlife

1700 9^th Street, 3^rd Floor

Sacramento, CA 95811

Phone: 916-902-9116

 

Book time with Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife

 

 

[Erik Goldoff]

does it hurt to have that checked?  You don't want to compress your C: drive, or anything with a hefty Program Files folder, as constant access will consume some additional CPU and memory to uncompress on access. 

I usually compress file shares, which IMNSHO become largely read only archives over time, historical documents/files are not accessed that frequently.

It helps to know which files you have, and in what proportions to the total, are incompressible so you don't waste cycles for zero return

Best to examine at least top level folder at a time.  The following is from the root of the C: drive on one of my desktop systems, only select folders have the 'compressible' bit set.

Notice that the 'size on disk'  is significantly smaller than the total 'size' reported, that's a useful gain for me

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[Poppy Lochridge]

Back in my call center days (before screen sharing was common!), I got a call from someone for whom the software I was supporting was not working as expected.

 

Somewhere in the call, I had the user try to describe to me what they were seeing…. And in that description was “the files I see are all blue, is that a problem?”

 

Yep, that was the cause of the call – drive compression was causing the software to behave oddly.

 

(Sorry this is so vague, not only was it 20+ years ago, I’ve tried very hard to block many, many things from that job out of memory.)

 

--P

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[Perisa, Nik]

Classification: Public

https://community.spiceworks.com/t/are-there-any-problems-with-un-compressing-a-drive/424500/11

 

 

 

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Sent: Wednesday, 28 May 2025 3:50 AM
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Subject: [ntsysadmin] RE: Question while I try my Google-fu

 

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