Skip to content

Important Information

Jump to bottom
ImminentFate edited this page Oct 19, 2017 · 18 revisions

Important Information

This has gained a lot more traction than I thought it would, so there are a few things that need to be cleared up:

  • This compression may not be permanent - it's a limitation of Windows itself, that the Xpress and LZX functions cannot be run live on new files that are added to the compressed folders. What this means is that over time, with updates to your games, you will experience compression decay; the folder will slowly but surely grow in size until it is back to its original size. You can somewhat get around this by first running Compact on any folder you choose, then run compact.exe /c /s on the folder afterwards which will mark it so that future files will get compressed

    • Note however that this will not use the Xpress algorithm, so the compression of new files won't quite be as significant, but it will avoid the folder decompressing entirely over time. This is still better than using the default NTFS compression in Windows ("compress this folder to save space")

  • Some games don't like this compression - Guild Wars is an example, it compresses down massively, but as soon as you run the game it will hang as it uncompresses the entire game again before it lets you play it.

  • This is not for use on programs or games that change frequently - If you have an online game that receives dozens of updates a month, it's probably not best to use the Xpress functions, for the reason mentioned in the first point. For these games use the compact.exe /c /s function instead, without any extra /exe: flags

  • Copying files to other systems or syncing to online services will not be compressed - According to two users' test results, this means that you can safely use this on OneDrive and Google Drive folders, as only the local variant will be compressed. If you copy the files to another drive or computer, they will be decompressed. However If your computer fails, you will only be able to recover the compressed files by placing the drive in a Windows 10 PC as other OSes cannot read the compression algorithms.

  • Works on Windows 10 Only - The features used in this program were only introduced in Windows 10. Earlier OSes will not be able to run this program.

  • Possible Issues if your system is not in English - The program was designed in English and parses Windows for strings it expects to find in English. If you use another language on your system you will almost certainly have bugs. Note that most of these bugs are purely visual, however some are functional.

Clone this wiki locally