Compress files

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'

"Thomas W.Wils>

I would say NEVER compress a solidworks file, I tried Eco sqeese to do this, my files were totally buggered afterwards!(luckily I do backups). As spork says, get another harddrive. It's safer! Pete

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

"Priorclavepetef" a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@mb-m05.aol.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

news:

snipped-for-privacy@aol.com (Priorclavepetef) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@mb-m05.aol.com:

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