NEVER do a disc compression of your entire hard drive!

Written by Nigel Turner Category: General & Computer Hardware 6 years ago

HUGE lesson learned that may save another user a lot of time and pain: NEVER do a disc compression of your entire hard drive (commonly done to free up memory on your computer). 3D can't interact with the data files and SQL services it needs if they are compressed. We did a complete hard drive disc compression and lost all 3D functionality, until we discovered the problem. Once we decompressed all the files that 3D needed, everything returned to normal with no loss of data. If you're running out of memory, it's okay to do a disc clean-up, just don't do a disc compression. 3D Tech Support spent 3 hours trying to fix the problem on Friday to no avail. It took my brilliant brother to find the problem and fix it. Why 3D didn't know this is beyond me!

Re: NEVER do a disc compression of your entire hard drive!

by Donna » 6 years ago

Donna

8 183 0

Good advice! File Compression is not the best way to recover space since it can impede performance or cause other issues, and there are much better ways of freeing space. One might selectively compress folders or files that aren't in use, but I certainly wouldn't do it for anything actively used, and certainly not the entire drive Windows is on (compressing another drive used for archived data might be OK). Any time the computer needs to access a compressed a file or program, it needs to be decompressed into memory before opening. In general, compression slows you down, because everything has to be uncompressed and recompressed coming and going from the drive, plus it has an increased risk of data corruption. Hardly anyone compressed a drive even when HD space was expensive...it just wasn't worth it, but given the cheap cost of hard drives these days you're better off offloading old files onto a portable or extra drive for storage, or even to cloud storage. Not to mention the files that take up the most space like images or videos are already stored in a compressed format, and compressing them further on a drive could make them use even more space.

If you've never archived or removed 3D reports, doing so can certainly help, esp. if lots of images are used: https://archive.3dinspection.com/en/tips-and-tricks/how-can-i-archive-and-remove-old-reports-from-my-hard-drive.html
And older data from other programs you used, but likely won't need on a regular basis might similarly be archived and stored somewhere else.
Here's some general online tips articles about managing space:
https://www.maketecheasier.com/recover-free-space-windows-c-drive/
https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000528.htm
https://www.techwalla.com/articles/the-disadvantages-of-compressing-files

What was actually done to the computer certainly would have been a helpful important detail to initially provide support, since compressing a whole C: drive isn't anything common or would have even been expected. But I'm glad to hear you were able to eventually figure out what had been actually done errantly, so it could be undone! I'm sure the computer is working much faster now.