Decompress a NTFS volume

[dreamliner77]

Stupid question, but how can I decompress a NTFS volume. Our sys admin decided it would be a good idea to "compress drive to save disk space."

 

[fitz]

assuming you are just talking about the built-in ntfs compression.. you can right click on the drive, select properties. There should be a check box for "Compress drive to save disk space"

Uncheck and apply.. and, depending on how big the drive is, wait for it to hit every file.

Make sure you have enough free space to hold the uncompressed files..

 

[LeeJend]

Our sys admin decided it would be a good idea to "compress drive to save disk space."

LMAO. Fire the guy. 95% of the data on a PC is already compressed. Double compression gains almost nothing.

 

[fitz]

LMAO. Fire the guy. 95% of the data on a PC is already compressed. Double compression gains almost nothing.

Not true at all. Especially on a file server where a lot of documents in Word/Excel format and text files can be compressed by a good 70-80%..

 

[dreamliner77]

I'm talking ALL files on about 150 desktops and laptops. I can tell you that it makes MS Mappoint take about a minute to open.

 

[vertigo]

lol was it his first day on the job? i agree, fire him! 😀

 

[fitz]

I'm talking ALL files on about 150 desktops and laptops. I can tell you that it makes MS Mappoint take about a minute to open.

what's a sysadmin doing messing with the desktops and laptops? Generally does not fall under a pure sys admin's role of responsibilities.

In any case, there are cases where compression can actually speed up application/file opens. In particular, files can sometime be accessed quicker if it a file that lends itself to compression (ie: test files and the like that obtain high compression ratios). It can be quicker because of the need for less disk activity to read the file (smaller size on the disk).

However, it is generally not advisable to compress a whole drive.. 😱

 

[dreamliner77]

assuming you are just talking about the built-in ntfs compression.. you can right click on the drive, select properties. There should be a check box for "Compress drive to save disk space"

Uncheck and apply.. and, depending on how big the drive is, wait for it to hit every file.

Make sure you have enough free space to hold the uncompressed files..

Doesn't work.

 

[fitz]

Doesn't work.

care to elaborate?

 

[dreamliner77]

I doesn't decompress anything. I still have half the files on my drive compressed.

 

[fitz]

do you have access/ownership of said files?

 

[Ron Bennett]

Looks like files are locked. Try to boot in WinPE Live CD or something and re-apply clearing the compression streams from files. But sorry can't dig in it. If your admin decided to save space why do you want to decompress data? In fact NTFS compression worth having it even on already compressed data such as 7-zip archives. Try to compress something with archiver, make a copy of created archive and apply NTFS compression to it. Notice that in most cases data would fit cluster size resulting in no excess of unfilled clusters.

 

[dreamliner77]

Mostly want it gone because access time to some files is slow. Plus it compressed my music collection (mpc). It's a laptop with a P-M so on battery, processor usage is an issue.