Autozeep v6

Version 6 adds the ability to revert all files to their original compression setting. The detailed stats generation debugging feature is removed to avoid a potential bug with big INI files. It contains a richer list of excluded files. It will also show you the total savings after every run, both in the popup after the run and inside the compressed_files.txt file. Finally I changed the icon and the license.

Oh and, as always, a bunch of antiviruses detect it as a virus like they do for everything written in AutoIt3. This has actually caused me grief lately as a company called Netcraft keep sending takedown requests to my host to remove a bunch of my software from my server. That's software that I've been hosting for years and now suddenly their scanners are picking it up and I keep getting 24-hour notices to take down stuff. Thankfully Netcraft is most of the time quick to reply to my false-positive claims and they take down their takedown requests. But it's annoying that I have to keep doing this just because some antiviruses that they decided to use throw false positives for AutoIt3 scripts.

You can download Autozeep v6 from here.

Autozeep v5

Version 5 adds some more excluded extensions as well as a report on files that are not compressed well enough. After or during a run, check the ini file for a list of file extensions that did not meet the target 97% (customizable) compression ratio. For example, a 1MB file that after compression takes 990KB has not met the target and its extension will be reported in the ini file. And if you do add the extension to the exclusion list, it will be decompressed next time it's encountered during a run.

You can download Autozeep v5 from here.

Finally, version 4 was accepted in Softpedia but they made some hilarious mistakes. I will contact them to correct at least the first one but for some reason, the "Author Homepage" link in the program listing directs users to this and I have absolutely no idea why. It should have been linking to this blog instead. Additionally they made some a lot of mistakes about what the program does. They seem to be suggesting that the program also defragments your drive, which it doesn't, in fact my advice is that you should manually defrag your drive after you run the program because it causes fragmentation. And a few other minor things here and there like that the program doesn't support SSDs (which it does) or that it monitors the drive when it's really just scanning the drive once, processes the files and then exits (it is not an always-on solution, you simply run it periodically).

But given that it's a free service and that they actually tested it to some degree means that I'm not complaining about it. Click the image below to check out the program listing.

Autozeep v4

Well that didn't take long, did it? Version 4 of Autozeep adds some more file extensions to the exclusion list.

Additionally, in the previous versions if a file was compressed and was matching the exclusion list, it would not be decompressed (unless it was modified recently). In this version though there is a extra case where excluded compressed files will be decompressed: if their compression doesn't cut more than 5% of their size. This is helpful if you have already compressed a ton of files and then you realized that you shouldn't have compressed some extension. So now you just need to add the extension to the exclusion list and rerun the program. And any files that had that extension and didn't compress well during your previous run, will be decompressed.

Finally, I tested Autozeep on the root of my system drive, not just on my user directory. It worked well. It compressed a bunch of files that couldn't not really be compressed hence the extra extensions that I added to the exclusion list but otherwise it worked just fine. Now I just need to let my defragmenter do its thing. I am using Diskeeper 16 by the way, it's good, I may write something about it in the future.

You can download Autozeep v4 from here.

Autozeep v3

What better way to prove that I'm not dead yet but to post about a new old-school freeware utility. The zipfile even contains a readme.txt file which you should definitely read carefully before you use the software.

Autozeep is a tiny tool that utilizes an often forgotten feature of NTFS: transparent compression of your files on the cluster level (or "block level", I can't remember what terminology Microsoft uses). What this means is that you can have compressed files which can be read and written to without having to manually decompress them. The compression isn't great but it can give you some free space if you are running out which, surprisingly, is not that unheard of since we started using smaller SSDs. Additionally if you are on an HDD with a fast CPU, in theory you may even see an increase in read speed if you are reading compressed files, since the bottleneck is the drive's read spread and not the CPU's decompression speed. YMMV

Windows already has some system directories marked as compressed. For example the directory where the Windows Error Reporting system reports gets stored is marked as compressed, meaning any error report that gets saved in there is on the fly compressed.

Now the bad thing about this kind of compression is writing to the compressed files. As I mentioned, if the HDD was you bottleneck, then it may even be faster to first compress your data and then write it, but there is one more thing to consider that doesn't apply to reads: fragmentation. If you try to edit a portion of a compressed file (I think files are compressed in 4K chunks by NTFS but don't quote me on this) you may end up with a larger compressed representation compared to the one you had before. Now the filesystem will need to find a place for the bigger chunk to be written too, creating an extra fragment for your file. Keep writing to the file and it'll become more and more fragmented. Of course, if you are using an SSD fragmentation is less of a problem.

So to avoid these issues and give NTFS compression a try I made Autozeep. It scans all the files in a directory and compresses any files that have not been modified during the last 30 days. Additionally it will decompress any file which has been modified in the last 3 days. The idea is that you can run this script every 7 days on average and it will keep any files that are rarely written to compressed and everything else uncompressed. At the same time it contains a list of file extensions that it will not even try to compress, like media files or archives since those cannot be further compressed by NTFS.

There are quite a few things that you can customize by editing an INI file (we're talking DOS and Win 3.1 technology here) so make sure that you read the readme.txt.

You can download Autozeep v3 from here.

In other news, I've moved to Poland some years ago and I now work like a Java developer. Which is why I can't take good care of most of my projects lately. But I'm still around and I'm still writing small programs every now and then even though I'm not publishing them.