Disk Cleanup: can I uncompress compressed files?
We have a lot of photos which are already compressed in .tif format. Having
carried out a Disk Cleanup recently and allowed compression of older files,
I am now concerned that further compression of .tifs will have degraded my
photos. Of course, if this is the case, then the damage has already been
done, and, in future, I will not allow compression by Disk Cleanup.
Meanwhile, can I get my photos back to non-archived state, please? Just
opening them doesn`t change anything, in that the file names remain in blue.
Incidentally, I think it would be nice to be able to exclude certain file
types, or certain folders, from compression when using that facility in Disk
Cleanup.
Re: Disk Cleanup: can I uncompress compressed files?
NO way could I leave this one slide.
1). Click Start
2). Click Run and type “cmd” to open a command prompt
3). Type “cd \” at the prompt to goto the root directory
4). Type “compact /u /s /a /q /i *.*” to decompress all files in all directories
You can run that command in ANY directory and it will decompress.
Re: Disk Cleanup: can I uncompress compressed files?
thirtysix you don't know how much that post may have helped me out. I've been looking for a way to do this for weeks. My company has outsourced it's IT to India and I am one of the few engineers left on site. They have recently decided to run the disk cleanup wizard on desktops and servers compressing all sorts of files. I would just like to point out if anyone thinks it is a good idea to click the compress old files checkbox when doing this then DON'T! MS should rename that checkbox to 'Cause problems and make my computer run slowly'. I shall give this command a try!
FYI running the wizard with this checkbox will indiscriminately compress any files over a certain age. This includes system files and .dll files. It is a really bad idea. Compression should only be used for files that are rarely accessed and that are not accessed over a network.
Re: Disk Cleanup: can I uncompress compressed files?
I feel your pain.
Once you've uncompressed run defrag a bunch of times untill the utility breezes through in a couple of seconds. There's no way to know your situation, but there are several freeware defrag solutions that work much better than the low rent option M$ has as standard.
For those whom aren't savvy, any file that's compressed is uncompressed "on the fly" by the system. On lower end systems you might see a performance hit because of this, on top end systems it is negligible.
Re: Disk Cleanup: can I uncompress compressed files?
Thitysix, you are a bloody wizard, i just made a batch file of this to add to my toolkit. So many people do this thinking it will make space on their system only to find it becomes too slow to use afterwards!
This little gem will save me time, many thanks.