Compress files

To compress a file Solidworks by the compression NTFS of Windows is a good idea?

 

It's probably as good an idea as the compression of other types of
files. Which is to say it's probably not a good idea. By another hard
drive. They're cheap nowadays.

'Spork'

 

Pete,

could you mail me one of your files which got "buggered", if possible
also the native ("unbuggered") version? I would be most interested in
getting a file EcoSqueeze corrupted.

Thanks,

Thilo

email to: support [at] ecocom.com

 

Here, millions of files have been though "Unfrag", not 1 problem signaled.
And the size of the files are divided by 2 (avg) the first time applied.

My .01 Eu
JM

(Besides, I would not compress any production file)

 

We have been using Unfrag for some time and don't know of any problems it's
caused. The best way to use it is to run it on the files and then make them
read-only. That way you can open them for reference without them ballooning
back to the original size.

WT

 

(Priorclavepetef) wrote in

Compressing SW files using something like Eco or Unfrag is not the same as
compressing them using NTFS compression.

Those tools that are designed for compressing SW files do it by removing
redundant data from the compound file. I suppose the problems that are
reported to occur with such programs are the result of stripping out data
that SW needs.

NTFS compresses files using an algorithm that doesn't discard any data.
It's similar to Zip, Rar, or any other generic file compression format.

The risk of compressing files using NTFS is probably non-existent (I've
never read anything about trashed files).

But having said all that, I have to agree with the conclusions in the other
posts. Space is cheap--buy another drive. Unless of course you are
working on a laptop.

Joel Moore

 

Joel,

EcoSqueeze (in default mode) and Unfrag are only defragmenting OLE/2
files. This is exactly the same as running any hard disk
defragmentation program, just on the file vs. on the disk. Yes, one
could say these tools remove redundant data, but neither SolidWorks
nor the user has any control about what data is exactly in the "file
shadow" - it really is leftover data garbage. By no means can it be
considered redundant or backup data for say file recovery.

It is as save to delete the file shadow as it is to copy a file,
because that is what it really does, copying stream by stream in a new
file and then deleting the old, fragmented file.

To date, I have never seen a single file which was corrupt due to
EcoSqueeze, and I'm pretty confident priorclavepetef cannot come up
with one either. The only case I remember was some network hardware
fault which corrupted any data sent over it (including files which
were EcoSqueezed).

The picture is somewhat different if you use the "advanced" functions
in EcoSqueeze. Here you can indeed delete parts of the file which
SolidWorks may expect to be there. It is recommended to not use this
particular functionality on production data, even though I also have
not seen or heard of a file which would not open after this "special
treatment".
The main purpose of this is solely to shrink the file size of copies
of your data if you run into bandwidth or email inbox size limitations
when you have to send files somewhere.

Thilo

 

I'm not the one that needs convincing. The poster I responded to is the
one that feels EcoSqueeze "buggered" up his files. I've never actually
tried any of these tools.

I just wanted to make the original poster realize that NTFS compression
doesn't have to be avoided just because some 3rd party utility wrecks
SolidWorks files with its fundamentally different method of "compression"
(in truth, defragging, as you mentioned). Whether it does or doesn't
corrupt files is irrelevant.

Joel Moore