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Win 11 compression
- Thread starter jordan12
- Start date
GotNoRice
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2001
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- 12,006
I assume you are talking about the file/folder compression built into explorer? If so, it's the same as it's always been. The advantage is that your data will take up less space on your drive, but by how much depends entirely on the type of files/data that you are compressing. Many types of data already use some form of compression (pictures, movies, music, etc) and will not be compressed much further, if at all, by using drive-level compression. Other types of data can show decent results from compression (text files such as logs, some database formats, etc.), but those types of files don't usually take up huge amounts of data.
Data storage is cheap enough these days that there is usually not much reason to enable compression. It can also slow down data access, and make files more difficult to recover if there is some sort of drive issue.
But on a rare rare occasion you might end up with a bunch of random non-compressed data (usually big log files) that actually takes up a fair amount of space; data that is important enough that you don't want to delete it but not important enough to worry about adding a dash of extra risk by compressing it. One example for me are data logs that I record when I play the game World of Warcraft. This data is stored in what is basically a big text file and a log from one night can be hundreds of megabytes. It can add up over time to multiple gigs. The files meet that criteria of "important, but not too important", and they compress well.
Data storage is cheap enough these days that there is usually not much reason to enable compression. It can also slow down data access, and make files more difficult to recover if there is some sort of drive issue.
But on a rare rare occasion you might end up with a bunch of random non-compressed data (usually big log files) that actually takes up a fair amount of space; data that is important enough that you don't want to delete it but not important enough to worry about adding a dash of extra risk by compressing it. One example for me are data logs that I record when I play the game World of Warcraft. This data is stored in what is basically a big text file and a log from one night can be hundreds of megabytes. It can add up over time to multiple gigs. The files meet that criteria of "important, but not too important", and they compress well.