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Extracting (or copying) files to a compressed NTFS folder makes Windows report the disk is full when it's not


I've been trying to extract a series of compressed files - total ~50GiB (uncompressed) - to a hard disk with about 55GiB of free space.


Because this is a slow hard drive and with limited capacity, and since the content is highly compressible, I thought it would be a good idea to extract it to a new folder with NTFS compression enabled.


Now, as the extraction progresses, if I right-click the folder at any given moment to see its properties, it'll report the correct disk usage (e.g. "size 4.5GiB; size on disk 2.65GiB"). But, if I right-click the drive, the properties window will report a much larger increase reported as "used space" - in fact, a little over than the sum of "size" and "size on disk".


And this goes up to the point where the extraction fails because Windows reports the disk is full.


After some research I found a comment in the microsoft forums:



This problem has to do with a known Windows 10 bug. When you copy a file to a NTFS folder that has compression enabled, the drive will use twice the space required and won't relinquish that until a reboot of the drive.



This looks bizarre enough because it appears to defeat much of the purpose of transparent compression IMO. But okay, at the end of the day what I want to know is if there's a way around this.


I tried suspending in the middle of extraction with Process Hacker, taking the disk "Offline" and then back "Online" via the Disk Manager (diskmgmt.msc) and resuming the process. The "Used space" number is then reported correctly, but the extraction fails.


Is there an actual solution?



Answer



The steps I used to work around the problem were:



  1. Disable NTFS compression on the target folder

  2. Begin extraction

  3. Monitor disk space usage and Suspend (freeze) the working process that is performing the decompression when the disk space is near full

  4. Select all decompressed files, except the last one; right-click them and enable NTFS compression

  5. Wait until they are NTFS-compressed

  6. Resume execution of the suspended process

  7. Keep doing steps 3 - 6 until all files have been extracted

  8. Finally, re-enable NTFS compression on the target folder.


And this is how I managed to install Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered.


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