Recover your precious storage space
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- čas přidán 20. 05. 2024
- Welcome to Tutorial Tuesday! Today I'm showcasing Compactor, a free program that can help you recover HUNDREDS of gigabytes of storage space in Windows!
Original Thriftcast episode: • Fix your streaming set...
Compactor Download: github.com/Freaky/Compactor
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I'd like to add some information to this.
"Why not just use the Windows compression in properties?" although it is still possible to use Indexing with this kind of compression, what Windows uses there is called LZNT1 Compression, it is really REALLY old, it can be REALLY slow to compress, as well as affect your general performance negatively (although just slightly in modern CPUs) and it is mostly unstable these days, it's easy but unreliable, instead Compressor uses a command-line app added in Win10 called "compact.exe", what Compressor does is give you a proper interface for using this, among other things
Also, if in case you have any issues with outdated software (Compressor hasn't been updated for 4 years by now), I'd recommend CompactGUI, It's pretty similar to Compactor as it also is an interface for compact.exe, but it's actively maintained and updated till this day, it also lets you choose between 4 different compression methods, all of them differing on performance and on how much it compresses.
beware that compression might make data unrecoverable in case of a drive falure. So if you want to compress important data, make extra double sure you have an uncompressed backup!
Making me remember my first PC, back in 1991. Had a thirty megabyte drive that I essentially doubled with a program called Stacker. Good times.
I remember that!
SmartDrive as well!
@@kyoudaiken and DriveSpace/DoubleSpace :) My 386 with a 120MB HDD was sweating under the weight of that thing running Win95, but every MB counted.
You don’t need 3rd-party software to do this. The same compression option exists for files and folders. It’s just under properties -> advanced.
That compress option built into Windows Explorer is there for individual folders as well. If you enable the option you can get WE to color compressed (blue) and encrypted (green, if using bitlocker IIRC) files. Compression and encryption are mutually exclusive using the built-into-WE compression.
Edit: to see how much has been saved it's in the size on disk and size parts of the properties window.
I'm not sure if this tool can do a little bit more as to exclude already compressed archives such as zip, 7zip, and such.
Sure you can do something about the hibernation file taking up space. Disable hibernation. Also, Everything is much better than Windows indexing.
And the page file can also be shrunk by manually setting a smaller size.
Important here is that everything and windows indexing is doing some very different things. Everything indexes primarly filenames / paths with some metadata indexing. windows search, however, is a full text search which if possible analyzes the whole content. Furthermore Windows Search significantly slows down as soon as it tries to search outside what its index contains. Everything is great if you know the filename you are looking for and iirc its not on a network share.
@@RC2225 You can include network shares in Everything's index and have them rescanned by a schedule - it's in the database settings.
@@kyoudaiken That's rarely a good idea, though. Windows relies on its page file for its memory management to function correctly and the logic of how it sets its size has improved greatly. So for the best stability, it's best to just leave it to manage the size by itself. Way too many people still repeat outdated recommendations like turning off page file entirely if you have enough RAM or just using a very small one, but the only thing you'll achieve is usually just affecting the stability of the memory management. It will most likely run fine most of the time...until it won't and you'll be scratching your head why out of nowhere, a certain game/app (or a combination of them) doesn't run well or crashes.
@@Case_ ran no page file since Vista and Win11 is just not happy with it off. I will say it doesnt seem to randomly throw things there for no reason. With ample RAM it sits at about 1.2-1.6GB give or take.
I'm asuming this dosn’t work that well with video files. Would love an updated video on video compression with modern hardware and settings (such as AV1 or HEVC) along with best practices and info on quality loss and stuff
I was baffled how good the scratch/cache drive got compressed. I don't use Adobe Products but I wouldn't be surprised if they stored some cache files as raw uncompressed video pixel data... Also fun fact: FFMPEG's lossless intra frame only video codec which is used for archival applications compresses images a lot better losslessly than PNG. I've tested it and I find this really baffling as well. And how fast this codec is compared to PNG with all filters enabled and ZLIB level 9... I recommend you to test this as well!
Handshake is pretty good converting and compressing videos
@@VideoGamesNYC I guess you mean Handbrake?
@@kyoudaiken but there is a point to the cache files being raw and uncompressed...
@@profosist You know how big they would be for 4K60 FPS? There are very fast lossless compression codecs for just that. It's much more efficient than just doing it on file system level.
Hey, I think at 1:41 mark you accidentally checked indexing off. I don't recall NTFS turning off automatically after applying compression on my systems.
I've just confirmed this on my VM (win11). Checked compression and Indexing is still there... Anyway, this tool is pretty neat and I'll definitely try it! Thanks!
Love the vids. Don't stop educating!
The compression option in Windows isn't just on the root drives, you can also set it for specific folders too, no need for third-party software. In the folder properties, click the Advanced button, and the option to compress the folder is there.
Correction: You CAN do something about the hibernation and page files. Disable hibernation via CMD prompt, and turn off virtual memory in system control panels. Doing so will remove your system's ability to hibernate (not a severe loss) and dump RAM overflow onto storage (which if you have enough shouldn't be getting used). However, I personally recommend at least 1MB of virtual memory because this is where BSOD dumps go to be filed on next boot into a minidump. Crashing for no viable reason a lot? Turn virtual memory back on for this explicit reason.
P.S: Unsure if you will mention it in the rest of the video, but I'll drop it here anyway. Disk Cleanup is a Windows utility that offers deletion of update downloads and old driver packages, and this should be done once every few months. This will delete your ability to roll back updates and to older drivers, but this is a fairly uncommon need. Setup delayed updates to Friday or Monday (Chris Titus has a great tutorial here) so that errors can have time to be ironed out or recalled before you get them live.
Love this program, need to use it more and play around. My new fav PC hack is to pin your recycle bin to your quick access section in finder. never need the icon again!
I also always pin it there! It's a life changing experience.
My new fav Recycle Bin hack of the past 20 or so years is to disable it ;) My philosophy has always been that if I delete something, then I had a reason for it and I want it gone from the disk, not just moved to a different folder. And I try to focus on what I'm doing enough so that I don't just delete stuff randomly/accidentally. (But I also still run a daily backup for my most important files, of course.)
@@Case_ I do the same. Windows makes it hard to do it because you have to do it for each and every disk drive... Also I do regular backups. So nothing to lose.
I personally never use Windows compression on anything other than games, since if something bad happens, I can just reinstall them. There's a trade off with using compression, you use more CPU power instead of saving disk space and benefiting from faster disk read speeds. Hard drives are relatively inexpensive if you need more space. That's why the Windows compact.exe tool never really gained popularity. It kind of takes a lot of time to compress. This means a lot of wasted processing power for just a few gigabytes saved. Then, if you update your game, for example, it gets decompressed. Defeating the whole purpose.
If it's on a hard drive the CPU usage is irrelevant even without the compression algorithms that are built for speed (mostly the trick is testing the compression ratio and giving up on compressing incompressible data quickly)
You get pretty weak compression ratios on games generally. Some exceptions, old games do gangbusters along with more modern stuff that isn't exactly packaged the most efficiently.
There's also the fact that using on-the-fly compression is fairly unpredictable. If you enable compression for the entire drive, you can no longer reliably tell how much space you actually have left. You may think you have 80 gigs left, and then an application changes a file (or a bunch of them) on your drive in a way that wouldn't really affect its uncompressed size but affects its compression ratio significantly, and suddenly you're at 50 gigs left with seemingly no significant file size changes.
Same when adding new stuff to the drive - you can't tell how much space will the files actually take, and with pretty high compression often being used by default these days, a fair amount of stuff doesn't compress well, essentially nullifying the space-saving advantage.
@@Case_ Yeah but also if you fill a drive or storage pool more than 80% and it's actively used, not just sequential cold storage or whatever...
Hard drive or SSD it's gonna hurt performance. Using less is strictly better and you don't really need to know how much free space you have, the lower bound is good enough.
why wouldn't compressed files be recoverable? It shouldn't be any different than having your drive encrypted which doesn't eliminate the possibility to recover it, just makes it more conditional
Absolutely huge! Saved over a tb in just one folder. 📂
Question about the cache drive: Isn't adobe footage normally already heavily compressed? Or which codec do they internally use for scratch footage? Is this maybe even lightly losslessly compressed stuff?
Thanks for the tutorial! I already use wiztree ( great program!)
How does this impact syncthing (if at all)?
"cache these hands" That's hilarious.
In settings you also can use a newer and better compression algorithm to have more results. I think you are using the very older because of the dual core usage. Is the same algorithm Windows uses by default, but using terminal/prompt or the compactor you actualy can use other algorithms, I highly recomend you to test, In my CS2 folder it saved for me 35% of ~40GB. I use the slowest compression avaliable, it didn't hurt my performance at all. My CPU is a i7 4770
Speaking about explorer, mine on 11 also crashes multiple times a day recently, Michaelsoft need to get their ship together.
Using the compress drive toggle in windows uses their older "LZNT1" compression format as far as I know.
Compactor uses the new formats. if you open settings you can use LZX which uses more than 2 cores for compression and decompression and is theoretically better at compression, I don't know how much it would affect loading times for stuff but it's the methood I use.
I guess the question here is why can't the built-in windows file and folder compression support the better compression algorithms
For me the software is fairly useless as I would constantly have to rerun it where is something like checking a box and windows and making every future file going forward compressed is far more handy
Indexing does not get turned off for me when I turn on compression on my computers (Windows 10 Pro /Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise).
I always turn on compression on my drives. The impact on the CPU is minimal. I did do a test a few years back and it was actually faster to use compression since the IO were way slower to load the file than the CPU at decompressing the data. Transfering less data and decompress it were faster in most cases.
Except on my large data drive where I use storage spaces and the REFS file system for the file checksum and repair functions, and it doesn't support compression. But correct files are more important than saving a bit of space in this case.
OMG I wasn't aware it would take an SSD over 24 hours to compress less than 700 GB. Now I can't use my pc for a day.
Think it is ok to use this on my C drive obs studio live streaming main drive? Or does it add more risk?
Do you mean the drive where you record your streams onto?
Hello,
Just curious what microphone that is?
Many thanks.
Probably, warm audio wa14
@@christbilly286Aye that is it. Thanks!
Can you do this to network drives? I have about 10 plus years of video projects that don't need to be access regularly and it'd be nice to save space on my TrueNAS Storage server like this!
You just an old compression on the server?
This just makes me want an automated way to do this like monitor x folder and run etc
Wonder why there is no way to use the better compression with the windows built in...
I still rate disk compression as a fiddly feature nobody wants to deal with.
But we hit an interesting point in computing and the CPUs are so strong that compression actually can make hard drives and Sata SSDs a bit faster.
Meanwhile if you compress a fast SSD it's still the old paradigm of strictly trading space for speed.
This reminds me of a legacy program called "Stacker" back in the day. Great idea, but terrible risk to data. Unrecoverable risk. Hoping this one is more reliable and more importantly, does NOT do any wear and tear to your hardware over time.
For me, I'm still skeptical.
It depends on the types of files and how often small parts are being changed in it in a regular basis. For example, I would never compress the registry hives and other frequently accessed database files. Compression can only be efficient when it uses big blocks. In Windows' registry hives, often single clusters are changed, but if the file is compressed the whole compressed chunk has to be re-compressed and written to disk. Now that I think of it: since the size of the chunks change a lot, it can also cause more file system fragmentation. Regarding data loss: Backups. Are. Mandatory. ALWAYS.
I remember Windows having this since Windows 2000. Though with a much faster but less efficient algorithm than Windows 10 and 11 uses.
I don't know much about compression. Will this affect load times? the fortnite folder For example will it take longer to load?
Yes to some extent it will whether or not you will notice or care is another thing but for games which purposely unpack their assets I would think you wouldn't want any additional overhead
For years I'd keep all my personal files in OneDrive because its included with windows and syncs the user libraries folders of windows including portable apps. Larger files would stay on my NAS and I'm currently in the process of moving all my OneDrive stuff to locally hosted Nextcloud, then syncing with either the official app or WebDav or SMB shares to mount a network drive.
Whenever I reinstall windows I'd just run the Chris Titus tech windows utility to install most of my programs with winget, chocolatey, or msstore
I reinstall windows every like 6 months because it feels D i r t y
I've used space sniffer for probably close to a decade now. I like it better than wiztree, but more or less the same thing. I personally would recommend getting another drive depending on the situation. I don't trust anything from MS. I wonder if that compression would make data recovery more difficult. Probably not.
I would never recommend anyone to do this.
Just delete files you don't need or buy a larger drive.
For people using M.2, 1TB drives are a waste of an M.2 slot, so get at least a 2-4TB drive.
Or just use SATA SSDs, since most mobos have 4-6 SATA ports it makes it more flexible to keep adding storage drives, so you don't get stuck with just the one or two M.2 slots that most mobos have.
couldn't you just turn on the windows compression, let it do its thing and turn of off and turn back on the index and months down the road redo this to keep saving space?
If a whole directory or drive has the compression attribute, new files also adopt it and will be compressed. I think this tool avoids this, which can be useful as well.
Yikes I had 1.17 TiB compressible on my C:\!
tuestorial
Oooh that’s good
You’d probably be better off using a humongous platter drive to store most things and just use PrimoCache to use a big chunk of your SSD to cache the platter drive, and then stop worrying about space. Drive compression isn’t terribly helpful because of how many things are already compressed anyway. If you only have a 1 TB SSD is just start putting everything on a huge multi-TB platter drive and just cache it using, say, 500 GB of your SSD. That’ll improve life every day more than worrying about what to attempt to compress today will. Nobody should be spending time doing this.
Toby\\JimHalpert
File compression is so unnecessary with storage pricing these days.
Also I would not run a file campression on my system drive ... ever.
Pied piper
I did that by removing Microsoft. 😁
Lol
BTRFS also has a very similar feature, but does ZFS also offer this? I've never used ZFS so far.
Hey deleting everything Microsoft, now that’s a good way to clear up some space! 😂 They’re everywhere nowadays.
Lucifer fan detected.
DETECTIVE
Better idea is to just buy a bigger drive. It's cheap and safer. 2 GB Nvme from reliable brands are often only like $100
I don't think anyone should do this, not because it's a bad idea, it's just unsustainable and doesn't solve anything. The real solution is to A) Get more storage B) Produce less data C) Delete data anything else is just kicking down the can.
You don't really need this tool. You can right click on any folder, go to properties, then to advanced and there you can also set the compression flag. Edit: But I don't know if Windows also performs the same checks like this tool.
That uses a different, less efficient compression method from 1995 (LZNT1, supported since Windows NT 3.51 (sic!)) . The approach from the video uses the XPRESS /LZX based algo available since Windows 10 - so not the same thing..
I don't like your last topics.
Then don’t click on them?
@@EposVox you should thank me for the advice. See, a few people watch your videos.
@@nickdual I'm the one who gave *you* advice. You simply said you didn't like what you chose to click on, like a child. I have nothing to thank you for.
If you're going to continue to talk to me this way, unsubscribe from me. Consider deleting your CZcams account while you're at it - no one wants these comments.
@@EposVox " I'm the one who gave you advice" don't make me laugh!
@@EposVox Your behavior like "adult"
Great, now do how to clear other storage on Mac OS cause that’s taking up 100GB on my laptop for no reason. I reboot my system and it takes up even more storage after that.
Empty the recycle bin and check your downloads folder and clean it up.