Compressing my C:\ Drive SSD?

[Grid21]

I've been slowly losing space on my SSD Boot drive, and I was wondering if Compactor is safe to run on my C:\ to help regain some storage space instead of buying a new SSD? Also, do you know if it affects music libraries for Virtual instruments?

[Freaky]

I strongly recommend against compressing your entire C drive - it might work, but neither Compactor nor the underlying compression system is designed for that. It's meant for compressing applications, specifically.

I run it on my Steam libraries (specifically steamapps\common, and steamapps\workshop\content), and have used it on entire Program Files folders without problems - though it may be wiser to specifically target the largest offenders rather than just throw it at everything.

As a good rule of thumb: don't compress anything you're not willing to redownload/reinstall/recreate. If you need safe, general-purpose compression, consider the old NTFS compression system instead - it's not as efficient but it is more mature and designed with general use in mind.

You can mix and match - e.g. NTFS compress your user profile, Compact your games folder.