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Decompress files and folders under NTFS on Windows 2003 Server

Someone has inadvertently compressed files and folders on one of my Windows 2003 Servers. I have plenty of disk space and would like to uncompress them. I have seen a 3rd party product that is cheap ? and may do it. Can someone advise me on the risks and the chances of success. I rate sucess at 100% anything less and perhaps I'll leave the folders alone, although from reading about compression, it does not appear to offer optimum performance for disk intensive systems. This server runs such an application. So, do I or don't I?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Lee W, MVP

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SOLUTION

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jwjjwj

ASKER

Thanks for your attempts to help with this question. I realise that one can compress and uncompress files and folders that way, however the questions relates to the use of 3rd party products and whether they are safe to use, and if a particular product is better than others. Perhaps I should have been clearer in my question and also perhaps this forum cannot advise on such matters. I think I will delete the question. Thanks again.

Lee W, MVP

I do not agree with your actions. Help us understand - why must you use 3rd party software? You do realize, that any time you add third party software you increase the complexity of things and that most third party software is going to call the exact same APIs that Windows calls to do such a thing. Have you heard of third party software for doing this? I haven't. I can't imagine many people would be rushing to develop such a product given the built in capability of Windows. Third parties may develop their own compression/decompression scheme, but it really makes little sense, in my opinion, to use a third party product when this is otherwise simple and built in to Windows.

jwjjwj

ASKER

I will try to help you understand but to do so one would have to take an objective rather than a subjective stance. The problem was I have found scatterings of compressed folders and files throughout the datastorage (user datastorage) of servers on a particular site. To manually go through and remove the compression was a fairly daunting task. Hence the original question, Is it safe to use a 3rd party program to scan and remove the compression? As an administrator of many systems, all Microsoft, I agree that using 3rd party programs generally is not desirable however I suspect the condition I have experienced is unusual. I was simply asking a question. I had no intention of doing anything at this time, simply attempting to understand the problem and look at a remedy. After posting the question, and not receiving any relevant answers, I have reconsidered the original question and decided not to proceed. The answers posted did not answer my original question, so I have decided to delete the question and will do so without arguing further. Thank you for your input.

Lee W, MVP

I have to object to closing this question because I believe we answered the question. I do not understand why you perceive the need "To manually go through and remove the compression". Why would you think had to do this manually? You could just script it using the compact command.

I'd also like to know what third party software you found...

dimsandwich

A related question.
A SQL Server mdf file has been compressed manually and now there is no room to uncompress it. Is there a way to do this without doubling up on the space required?