Saturday, 8 June 2013

Why does NTFS compression take up a lot of space?

Why does NTFS compression take up a lot of space?

To save some disk space I figured it might be a good idea to compress the VMware vSphere Client I have installed because I almost never use it.
I was surprised to find that it had the exact opposite effect on free disk space. I tracked it down further and found that it is related to compressing the Help folder. The loss of disk space is not reflected in the folder size.
I repeated the compress/decompress cylce three times to make sure another program did not coincidentally take up the disk space. It might be notable that the folder contains a large number of small files (≈ 30k).
Why is that so and can I somehow find other folders that I should decompress to save disk space?



Without compression:

With compression:

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