Lost all my space when compressing a game

[AtticTwo]

I tried compressing ARK Survival Ascended, It said it would save around 10% i clicked compress and it just started chewing away at my free space (around 200gb) second by second i kept loosing space on file explorer everytime i refreshed it. Now my SSD has 40mb of space left out of 930GB??
Any help? did it just brick my ssd??

[SolvoFounder]

your ssd is almost certainly fine and the data is not lost — this looks like the classic volume shadow copy / System Restore trap, not compactgui literally eating the disk. when System Protection is enabled on that drive, every file compactgui rewrites gets snapshotted as a shadow copy, so free space bleeds away roughly 1:1 with how much it compresses (matches your "200gb gone second by second").

to get the space back right now: open an admin command prompt and run vssadmin list shadowstorage to see how much is parked in shadows, then vssadmin delete shadows /for=X: /all (X = the drive you compressed). gui route: This PC -> the drive -> Properties -> System Protection -> Configure -> Delete, and drop Max Usage right down. space should return almost immediately.

before running compactgui again, turn System Protection OFF for that drive or it will just happen again. also fwiw ARK Survival Ascended is mostly already-packed .pak/.utoc data, so the real compression gain there is tiny — probably not a game worth compressing at all.

which drive letter was it, and was System Restore on for that drive? happy to walk through it.

[AtticTwo]

i think i fixed what ever happened, i panic deleted ARK and rebooted my computer and i think i got my space back, I'm not exactly sure how much free space i had before trying to compress but i regained half my drive back (around 250gb). I tried putting the command in and it said i was only using 628 MB so i think i fixed it.