COMPRESSING HARD DRIVE

COMPRESSING HARD DRIVE (NOT)

I compressed my H drive by clicking on the checkbox of "Compress this drive to save disk space". I never used this Windows 7 utility before, but I was bold to use it since I had backed up all my H files yesterday and I don't have any new necessary files there that I need to back up.  So clicked I went on the OK button to begin this new chapter of knowing computers.

After a minute of compressing, a prompt message came telling me that one of the folder cannot be compressed because it had run out of disk.  I had 21.8 MB of free space and 78.1 MB of used space when I started compressing and this message came up.  I pressed the Ignore All button after the computer kept prompting the same message over and over when I only clicked the Ignore button on the same folder but on different files in that folder.

Less than a minute later, the Properties dialog box returns a new picture of my H drive.  It turned the whole disk blue and the violet color signifying my free space were all gone.  In other words, instead of compressing, the computer used up all my disk space.

I was wondering what happened, of course, so I let the check remained on the checkbox of "Compress this drive to save disk space" and clicked the OK button again to see if it will compress the now-full disk space. Nothing happened.  So I unclicked the check out of the checkbox and pressed OK to see what will happen. The computer gave me a prompt message whether I want to uncompress the H drive.  So, I said let's go for it, since compression does not work.

The computer then uncompressed each one of my files and folders and in less than 30 seconds finished with all my files and folders the same as it was before this ridiculous experiment of trying out the "Compress this drive to save disk space".

There's something to be learned in this.  Probably not to compress the hard drive at all, whether it is a server drive like my H drive or a computer drive like the C drive.

John