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[Folly]

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

Compress games and applications, or anything taking up space on your hard drive. This GUI uses the compression software already built into Windows. Compressed files are still fully readable. Typically no discernible impact on performance in compressed games and apps. Results vary between files, but many games are seeing 50% or more reduction to size on disk!

My Fortnite folder went from 18GB to 10GB.
My Middle Earth:SoW folder went from 67GB to 59GB.

Yay free space!

[smjjames]

You sound so freaking much like an ad. lol.

[milo christiansen]

NTFS compression, how exciting, how... Ancient. You could do all that in the days of Windows XP and before.

Just right click on anything, click "properties", look at "attributes" at the bottom, click "advanced" and choose "compress contents to save disk space".

While "compact.exe" is a little better, it isn't a big enough difference to get all excited about it.

[wierd]

Be sure to defragment afterwards!!  NTFS compression is "Stream compression", which does "compress in place".  It injects the freed space per compressed block as a bunch of shotgunned bits of free space all mixed in.  You need a really good defragmenter, like defraggler, to fix it afterwards.

[Reelya]

I think the point here, reading the github stuff, is that there's a program called "compact.exe" which uses a more advanced algorithm than the standard "compressed files" NTFS thing that windows uses. The GitHub project gives you a front-end to that so you don't have to learn the commandline parameters. Looking at the commandline help, there are higher levels of compression than the default that Windows uses.

Haha, one time I cloned my Windows 7 drive, then put full file compression on the new image, then cloned it back onto the original partition (using Norton Ghost on bootable media). That's because Windows can't add compression on any system file it's currently got a lock on. That saved an additional 2-3 GB of space if I recall, the compressed size went down from around 12GB to 9GB.

I'm going to run some tests here. I have a folder with a copy of all my portable apps in it, it's 41.8 GB of files. Currently taking up 28.4 GB of space, and that's with full normal compression running (which I made sure of by turning off compression on the containing folder, then turning it back on again and telling it to apply it to all subfolders and files).

EDIT: Initial test results were very dissapointing. Standard compression of 28.4 GB was only reduced to 28.3 GB after running compactGUI. That was at the "best" compression rating that was recommended for files you access often. There is one higher-tier compression setting, LZX, but it's not recommended for files you access frequently.

EDIT²: I take that back. Turning on "apply to hidden and system files" has in fact made a significant difference compared to Windows' default compression options. It seems without that checkbox it was skipping over a large number of folders instead of applying max. compression to everything. Maybe it depends on the type of folder, but this does give the option to apply compression to many more files than it would normally let you.

- 15% done, an extra 0.9 GB saved
- 16% done, an extra 1.3 GB saved

Well, at 100% done the size of the folder is now 21.9 GB. That's down from 28.4. So it saved 25% of the already-compressed space. That's definitely worthwhile. I was willing to settle for e.g. 5% extra space.