Win10 keeps compressing C drive files (new and old). Cannot stop it.

f14tomcat said:

Agree on the corruption. 27 Terabytes would be a Super-Sized drive! NTFS is reporting best it can, but those JPGs are sick.

If you decide to delete them as lx07 has rightly suggested, hold the shift key down while you are clicking delete in order to permanently delete them......to avoid any chance of it attempting to send them to the Recycle Bin and possibly causing more corruption.

Thanks for all the assistance so far! I have decided to delete them while holding down the shift key. After wrapping it up, I now have 25 gb of space again in my C drive. The compression of my files has not changed. Newly created files are still being compressed.

Do you think the OS reacted to the corrupted image files by compressing the other files on my C drive in order to save space? If so, should I now, as the corruption has (hopefully) been halted, attempt to decompress the files or would it not have any significance at all.

If you didn't already, open File Explorer, go to "This PC", right click on your C volume and make sure "Compress this drive to save disk space" is blank.

Like this :



Compression is inherited from the folder down so start there.

If that is OK then look at
C:\Users then
C:\Users\YourName then
C:\Users\YourName\Desktop or
C:\Users\YourName\Documents\ProblemDirectory

Your problem is NTFS compression not compactOs for sure. You could have something playing with your directory settings but you need to find which folder is top of the list that the others inherit compresson from first.

f14tomcat said:

If you have not already, restart the machine and let it sit at rest for a bit...say 15 minutes. That will give it a chance to run thru some scheduled maintenance that occurs after boot and login, during idle time. After signing in, just leave it alone for a while. Don't even touch the mouse. Then see if the same things happen with new files.

May also be that even at 25GB, you are below the 20% threshold of the Low-Disk sensing, and it is triggering Windows to compress what it can. That can be verified if you look at your My PC display and see the red bar.

After rebooting and idling for about 20 minutes, I tried to create new files. Unfortunately, the auto-compression still seems active.

C drive displayed no red bar at the My PC display and compression of C drive was also unchecked:

I find it somewhat confusing that Windows just recently decided to compress all my C drive files (when it has been red occassionally for the past months), whilst files on my D drive (red status bar, below 5% space available) remains uncompressed.

Could this compression state have any negative effects aside from (slightly?) slower performance? If not, I'm tempted to leave it at that for now and occassionally keep looking for solutions while trying to create more space...

f14tomcat said:

I'm only pointing what appears a little out of the ordinary to me. Your Programs Files (x86) is very large....almost 29GB...

While 26.7TB allocating 85GBis normal???

f14tomcat said:

No, of course not. Was pointing out other areas.

Fair enough but their disk is 190GB. 29GB isn't so much.

Perhaps it is overfull - that is a question but I often fill my C drive with no ill effects (except it shuts down and will not boot).

However the fact their disk has 26.7 TB (not GB) in Users is interesting as this is 200x the total space avaliable on the disk (all these 10GB files taking 4KB on disk).

That is the bit that needs analysis.

lx07 said:

If you didn't already, open File Explorer, go to "This PC", right click on your C volume and make sure "Compress this drive to save disk space" is blank.
I have just checked and strting from
Like this :



Compression is inherited from the folder down so start there.

If that is OK then look at
C:\Users then
C:\Users\YourName then
C:\Users\YourName\Desktop or
C:\Users\YourName\Documents\ProblemDirectory

Your problem is NTFS compression not compactOs for sure. You could have something playing with your directory settings but you need to find which folder is top of the list that the others inherit compresson from first.

I have just checked and the compression starts from C:\Users\xxx\Documents and C:\Users\xxx\AppData onwards.
However, I also found that the folders "Drivers", "Intel" and "Recovery" in C:\ are compressed. Would starting to decompress from these points onwards be a solution?

f14tomcat said:

I'm only pointing what appears a little out of the ordinary to me. Your Programs Files (x86) is very large....almost 29GB....67K+ files and 5K+ folders (directories). Mine by comparison is around 3.9GB, and I have a lot of stuff installed. Do you have Steam installed? Or something else that is very space consuming? In Tree Size, if you expand it using the ">", you will see what all that is, by size.



Also, your Windows directory is big, like a Clean Disk has never been done. For comparison, this is my Tree Size, and I have Office 365 and lots of stuff on here.

Yes, I have Steam indeed. Just looked and its folder is about 22 gb. I have never performed a Clean Disk indeed... how would I approach this and is it necessary to perform routinely?