CompactGUI REDUCING free space more and more...

[Milincho]

Trying to compact a folder containing game installations.
The drive had 440GB free of 1.8TB

after using CompactGUI it SHRANK to 391GB...

did 'Uncompress' and it shrank AGAIN to 385GB...

tried to compress it again and the free space lowered AGAIN to 377GB...

'Uncompress' again... and 361GB

I'm compressing it again, and at 38% it is now at 340GB... so a fucking 100GB LESS than I started with... 🤦🏻

How do I remove this shit and get the original free space back??

[Iridium-IO]

That's a horrific bug, but that sounds like a Windows problem (since I just use the default Windows methods).
It's probably creating a copy of the compressed data under the hood and not cleaning up after itself.

Open a Terminal window in the program folder (Right click > Open in Terminal, or Open Powershell Window here) and type in:

compact /U /exe /S /F /A /I

That should forcefully uncompress everything and hopefully Windows cleans up after itself.

[SkyNinja]

Uncompressing files definitely seems to do something unpleasant.

[DTMelkor]

Encountered similar bug in 3.2.0.
Explorer shows that folder is compressed, but disk space was reduced (about 10 Gb).
Tried uncompressing via compact /U /exe /S /F /A /I but it didn't work.
Tried uncompressing via TreeSize utility and it also didn't worked, but showed 'Error 448, The WOF Driver encountered a corruption in the compressed file’s Resource Table.'

[realNZZN]

Also having this issue in v3.2.1, could be an issue with windows compact itself but something is really messed up, I've lost 571 GB (61% of the disk!) and can no longer use an important backup drive.
#417

edit: This might be the same issue https://superuser.com/questions/966754/ntfs-compression-ate-all-disk-space-with-no-possibility-to-recover

[setsumi]

Try to check the affected folders with AlternateStreamView. According to this comment #315 (comment) compression system used by CompactGUI does use alternate data streams which may be left not cleared taking up drive space.

[Roki100]

Try to check the affected folders with AlternateStreamView. According to this comment #315 (comment) compression system used by CompactGUI does use alternate data streams which may be left not cleared taking up drive space.

so the data consumption is caused by alternate streams?

[Masamune3210]

There is a reason they told you to check.....

[Iridium-IO]

Seeing as this seems to be an issue with the underlying filesystem and not confirmed to be due to CompactGUI, I'm closing this for now. Feel free to re-open if more relevant information is found