From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

Using file and drive compression

- [Instructor] Compression was a popular topic in the early 1990s. Back then, file size expanded beyond what hard drives of the era could handle. One solution that became quite popular was file compression. Utilities such as Stack Electronics Stacker and Microsoft's competitor DoubleSpace were extremely popular. DoubleSpace lingers today as a file and drive compression utility that's part of Windows 10. If your drive storage is getting tight, you can consider compression as a short-term solution to the problem. Now I say short-term because the long-term solution is to get a larger hard drive, but compression works in the meantime. Before trying the compression solution, check your computer's media to see how storage capacity sets up. Press the windows and e keyboard shortcut to bring up a File Explorer window, and from the left side, choose this PC. Check the drive's capacity indicators. As these bars move right, capacity decreases. When the level gets really tight, the bar color changes to red. Applying compression to a file or folder or even an entire drive can alleviate the situation. The technique for a file or folder works the same. I'll browse to my sample folder to compress a folder to show you how it works. Right-click on the folder icon and choose properties. In the folder's properties dialog box, general tab, click the advanced button. Choose the option compressed contents to save disk space. Click OK and click OK again to close the dialogue box. You want to apply the changes to the folder, any sub folders and files for it to be most effective. OK. The folder and all its contents are compressed. They occupy less space. A special flag appears in the upper right corner of the icon indicating that the folder is compressed. This folder works like any other folder. You can open it up to browse its contents and you see that the icons inside the folder show the same compression flag. This is because all the files are compressed and you can open them with only a minimum amount of overhead, but still, less disk space chosen. Compressing an entire drive works similarly. Moving back to the this PC window, you right-click on the drive icon, the one you want the compress, choose properties and select this item in the properties dialog box general tab. Compress this drive to save disk space, click OK. This type of compression works on the fly, unlike zip file archives which must be opened and their contents extracted to be accessed. This disk compression works as you use the drive. Be aware that some files don't compress well. Media files specifically are already compressed, so if you try this technique on those files, you won't see any capacity increase. And again, this solution is short-term. It may buy you a few more gigabytes of storage if you're lucky, but the true solution is to get another hard drive.

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