Just how many cases are there of files getting corrupted after using this program?

[YayJohn]

The author says how it's beta software and shouldn't be used on irreplaceable stuff and all that but I do wonder just how many cases are there of people getting corrupted files after using this program?

[DrWhoCares]

Well actually, I had the same question. I haven't noticed any issues, but just a few days ago, #40 happened. That has since been fixed however.

[Freaky]

#40's more or less it as far as concrete reports go.

There's the occasional report of a game that stopped working after being compressed, but these seem to commonly include the same set of games (Assassins Creed Odyssey, and I think CoD have been mentioned a few times), which might suggest some weird incompatibility. Usually these users mention uncompressing fixed it, but sometimes they reinstall, so it's possible some of them were actually corruption.

At the end of the day, you're reading and writing large chunks of data, and computers aren't perfect - there's risk of corruption at every step in the path even if Compactor and the Windows Overlay Filter driver are perfectly correct in every way. This is why filesystems like ZFS, btrfs and ReFS have data checksums, and why servers usually come with ECC memory.

Between that and the certainty that software is basically never perfect, I feel it's wise to encourage a bit of paranoia before people use something I made to rewrite hundreds of gigabytes of data.

[Roph]

Can just confirm with another ubisoft game, ghost recon wildlands. Compacting didn't save much space, but the game hung on loading every single time. Uncompressing back to normal and it's fine again.

I figured maybe it was because I used LZX, so I tried again using XPRESSS16K, but got the same issue. Oh well.

[Tazriel]

I found a way you can compress Ghost Recon Wildlands as well. Just compress the game folder with the algorithm that fits to your hardware(LZX/XPRESS16K...). It has only a little effect on loading times. And afterwards just right-klick the two .tbf files in the main folder and in properties select compress.

This will uncompress the terrain files and recompress them with the old windows NTFS compression algo (LZNT1).
This way I completed the main game without any issues. I have it installed yet to play through the DLCs, but they don't seem to fit my taste.
I always test if their are any problems with file compression and try to find a way to make it run.
But for now i have found no game that did not work with compact.