How to Compress Entire Drive C in Windows Including Locked Files

compressionntfswindows

If I just set checkbox for compressing drive C in Windows Explorer, I will get numerous file sharing errors, because many files are opened when Windows is running.

Is it possible to compress drive in monopole mode somehow, so that it compress all files>

Best Answer

DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT DO THIS!!

Source: I did the exact same thing a year back and it renders the system entirely unusable. In my case, the process completed without any error, but when you boot, Windows doesn't create a mechanism to properly decompress the data and boot fails. You can compress other folders but leave out Windows and Program files at the least.

Besides, compressing might even mean slower performance depending on your processing power, since everything has to be decompressed every time (though it could be marginally faster if your I/O speeds are the bottleneck).

Related Solutions

Linux – How to compress multiple files into one archive using lzma

One thing you could do is use tar:

tar cf files.lzma --lzma file1 file2 ... fileN

Or, simpler,

tar cf files.lzma --lzma file*

That creates the files.lzma archive which you can then unpack using:

tar xf files.lzma

Windows – Force all files in a NTFS compressed folder to automatically compress [Windows]

When you copy uncompressed files into a NTFS compressed folder the compression level isn't changed, and you cannot set them to compress them automatically (only newly created files are created as compressed). Instead you have to use compact.exe to compress all the files in the folder after you have moved files in there. You can do this using a batch file - change directory to the compressed directory and run the command:

compact /c (use /s to include subdirectories)

or, to save changing directory:

compact /c "c:\compressedfolder\*.*"

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – How to compress multiple files into one archive using lzma

Windows – Force all files in a NTFS compressed folder to automatically compress [Windows]

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