[Feature request] Monitor compressed directories for changed/added files and compress them

[kwencel]

It would be great if the program remembered which folders did it compress and monitored them for newly added/modified files (or just simply - monitored for uncompressed files in that directory) and compressed them.

It could work as a scheduled process (e.g. checking compressed folders every 15 minutes) or better - using some kind of filesystem events subscription (Windows equivalent of Linux kernel inotify module).

I think it would be a huge timesaver when applying compression to folders which are generally read-only but are sometimes updated.

[Iridium-IO]

It's on the roadmap :)
I messed up my computer installation and lost a whole bunch of progress a few months back (I'd migrated about 70% to WPF instead of WinForms) which was severely disheartening so I dropped it for a while. But I'm going to start working on this again real soon hopefully and folder tracking is high on the agenda of new features.

[kwencel]

Oh man, that's so sad to hear about the lost progress. :( But hope it will be easier this time as you already have in mind how it should look like. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. :)

[BlueDrink9]

Even to start with just keeping a log of which folders have been compressed would be very helpful, if even just for manually checking what folders a user chose to compress last time in the event of a reinstallation, for example

[Werve]

I think to detect if there are new files to compress it could simply compare the total size of the folder at the time of compression and the current one, if it is different repeat the compression (which itself should process only uncompressed files).
Maybe is also good to add an option to choose if automatically recompress the folder(s) or just show a change notice.

[Iridium-IO]

@Werve I'm currently working on this, using a filesystem watcher to detect changed folders and add them to a notification list in CompactGUI. Right now I'm not sure if I want to keep them compressed by running compression when the system is idle, for the time being it'll just show which ones have decayed compression.

[foulman]

Just to throw in my possibly not valuable 2 cents, keeping an eye on the USN journal for each drive is the way that my most favorite-est utility ever, Everything keeps track of changes. In fact, there's an SDK, and maybe more info in the forums or if the creator was contacted. Maybe this will save you some time, maybe not, you could already be doing something similar. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Also, I was very curious, would it be possible to say... shoehorn other compression types into the system? There are tons of existing DLLs and whatnot freely available beyond what MS provides.

Oh, actually now that I think about it, the compact.exe /CompactOS:always feature may be useful here? I'm not sure if that maintains compression on the files, or reapplies it if a file changes from an update. Perhaps something through Storage Sense?

[Iridium-IO]

@foulman the USN journal is interesting for sure, but I've gone with the FileSystemWatcher for this - it's easy and relatively lightweight to use.

As for adding other types of compression - definitely not something I'm willing to do, even if I could. There are a few people having issues with the built-in compact function as it is, without tacking on the problems that come with further compression options. I was tempted to port this to linux as well to make use of BTRFS compression but given I've barely used linux, I don't particularly fancy doing that.

CompactOS:always only works on the windows directory, I believe.

Right now it's actually really straightforward to use a filesystem watcher, capture when a folder is changed, then wait for the system to be idle and analyse the folder then. I could even automatically start compressing while the system is idle, it's really easy to do, but the issue comes with keeping up with the multitude of ways things can change halfway through