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Freaky / Compactor

A user interface for Windows 10 filesystem compression
MIT License
1.18k stars 49 forks source link

Compactor Seems to copy files to AppData\Local\VirtualStore\ when compressing files on C drive. #73

Open 46505849-FN opened 2 years ago

46505849-FN commented 2 years ago

Sorry if this is an inappropriate usage of Github, I normally only use this site as a user and I don't really use my account for much. This is my first time reporting an issue of any kind for anything on Github.

So it's pretty much as the title suggests. I noticed it after I did some digging in Appdata as I tried compressing a large game only to see I had lost 50gb of space. It really had me worried.

When compressing folders from OTHER drives, Compactor works normally and with CompactGUI, ALL my drives compress normally.

I can get into more specific details if need be, but I thought it might be worth including that my C drive is an SSD and my other 2 drives are HDDs.

Freaky commented 2 years ago

VirtualStore is meant as a compatibility measure for legacy apps which write their configs/data to Program Files (and the global registry) instead of %USERDATA% while having tighter access controls to those folders for less privileged users - writes get redirected there and reads are served from there first to give such apps the impression of full read-write access.

This is likely an indication that you need to run Compactor with Administrator privileges (right click on the executable and there should be a Run as administrator option in the drop-down menu). You'll want to delete the files in VirtualStore, though you may want to do so with care as it's possible some apps are using that folder to store their own data.

Looks like I can opt out of VirtualStore by embedding a manifest in the Compactor executable. I ran into difficulties last time I played with manifests but I guess I need to give it another go because this behaviour is quite unwanted.

46505849-FN commented 2 years ago

Thank you! Running as admin worked perfectly. Also, I made sure to double check the date modified/created and not just the names when I was deleted the copied files. Everything is fine now and I shall continue compressing!