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Compress this drive to save disk space


Avinexis

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Hey guys. Just wondering, is it a good idea to compress my backup drive to make extra room? What are the pros and cons?

 

I need to add that I watch a lot of videos and play my music directly from that drive. I'm not so worried about speed as I am doing damage (like needing to reinstall the OS and the OS not being able to read the compressed data on the backup drive, etc.)

 

I still have a lot of room, but...I'd like to have MORE room, if that makes sense :biggrin:

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Sure, the compression will get you some room though I'm thinking it won't be much. This compression (I'm assuming the option Windows gives you that will make the filename blue in explorer) isn't very efficient because it's to save space but not give up any usability (at least not give up much). I just compressed a copy of Big Buck Bunny; it reads the size as 885MB, which it is uncompressed, and the size on disk is 884MB, so the compression got me a whole megabyte. True, uncompressed the size on disk is larger than the actual filesize, but it still reads 885MB when uncompressed.

It's up to you. It will take awhile for your computer to compress an entire drive and you may only get back a few hundred MB (I can't know without trying, just guessing the amount). Up to you if it's worth it.

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Sure, the compression will get you some room though I'm thinking it won't be much. This compression (I'm assuming the option Windows gives you that will make the filename blue in explorer) isn't very efficient because it's to save space but not give up any usability (at least not give up much). I just compressed a copy of Big Buck Bunny; it reads the size as 885MB, which it is uncompressed, and the size on disk is 884MB, so the compression got me a whole megabyte. True, uncompressed the size on disk is larger than the actual filesize, but it still reads 885MB when uncompressed.

It's up to you. It will take awhile for your computer to compress an entire drive and you may only get back a few hundred MB (I can't know without trying, just guessing the amount). Up to you if it's worth it.

So I could always just uncompress it again if I don't like the end result?

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So I could always just uncompress it again if I don't like the end result?

Yes, but unchecking the option in the drive's properties might not uncompress them (I'm not sure though). If that's the case then you can just select the highest level folders, because they will also be compressed, in their properties uncheck to compress them, and select apply to all subfolders and files.

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And it also takes forever to uncompress all those files. (IIRC)

 

You are better off going through and just deleting old stuff you don't use (IE: old movies you've watched plenty of times.)

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