Questions about "Compress Drive" or "Compress old files" in XP

[JackHawksmoor]

I?m managing a computer used by maybe 20-30 students running XP Pro, which only has a 10GB hard drive. Needless to say, it?s almost completely filled up (less than 150MB left, and that was after I went through and deleted some junk).

I could enable quotas, but for the most part I really don?t think the students are doing anything ridiculous as far as wasting disk space. My other two options would seem to be either running the ?Disk Cleanup? app and allowing it to ?Compress Old Files?, which it claims would free up close to 3GB. Or I could enable disk compression for the drive.

Does anyone have any experience with either method? Where does the ?Disk Cleanup? app stick the compressed files-I mean are they liked Zipped up and stuck in the original location? Or is it using the same kind of disk compression that the other settings uses?

I?ve NEVER used disk compression before (and never would, on a personal computer), because I?ve always heard horror stories about stuff getting corrupted, but that was years ago, and XP/NTFS might do the job fine. Also, this system is (not surprisingly) pretty old. It?s like a 650MHz P3, Katmai core (or however you spell that), so it doesn?t have a bunch of spare CPU cycles to devote to compression.

Any thoughts? I?m about ready to ?throw the switch? and see what happens if I enable disk compression on the whole drive. Could I use ?Enable Disk Compression? in conjunction with ?Compress Old Files?, or would that be doing basically the same thing (or maybe they?re EXACTLY the same setting-I have no idea).

 

[bsobel]

The NTFS compression can be applied to the whole drive, directories, or even individual files. The cleanup tool just flips it on for specific files.

Unlike the old stacker days, NTFS compression is rock solid, and on many systems actually speeds up IO (since unless your CPU bound it's quicker to read less info and decompress it than actually read the whole uncompressed dataset)

Bill

 

[Navid]

This is not going to solve your problem.
No matter how much space it is going to give you, it will be gone soon.

You need to backup data that the students don't need everyday on optical media (CDs or DVDs) and delete the data from the hard drive.

You should also put quota in place so that those who clean up don't get penalized by those who are careless and don't clean up after themselves.

 

[JackHawksmoor]

Thanks! I turned it on (took about 10 hours), and my free space went from 150MB to 1.7GB. Not great, but it's something, and I've seen no problems so far.

Navid, I'm going to let it go for a while, but you're probably right that it'll end up a problem again. I'm not even sure what I'd set quotas for.