I've looked & keep finding lots of articles telling me what I already know.
I know the file size difference is because I have Compress contents to save disk space enabled.
I know about the difference between block size & clusters & all that.
I know about sparse files & small files in the Index/MFT.
But the difference is too great for any of that to be explained by those.
Now the folder is mostly filled with text, epub, mobi, pdf, docx, etc. But has many that have images in them & even some 100MB+ jpg & png CBZ files.
The Size: was stated to be 24.6GB, which seems to be as expected.
When I saw the Size on disk: I thought it was a bit much for the compression since it said 459MB so I was a bit concerned, but then I noticed I had overlooked the decimal & it was actually only 4.59MB which is completely impossible. Even if it was ONLY text I'm pretty sure 24GB of text being compressed to only 5MB is smaller than, or at least close to if not, what is possible with current technology.
The idea of sparse files also doesn't seem plausible for such a huge size reduction. It's 0.000018 the size of the original that's like essentially 18% of 1% of 1% of the original. Like you took 1 part out of 100, broke that into 100 pieces, then took 1 of those, then broke it into 100 pieces then took 18 of those. Just the metadata for a sparse file for that many zero blocks would take up too much space for that to add up.
With the current, as I am now writing it, test 3, Size on Disk: is 377MB about 1.5% of the 24.9GB current total size:, which is a lot higher, but still unreasonably smaller than any solution seems to make sense.
WinDirStat & TreeSize-Free show the same problem.
When testing TreeSize-Free in my 2nd test the file size had changed as things got added to the folder during normal use, as it was a couple days later, but the new sizes are consistent with Windows' Properties
Windows (Test 2)
- Size on Disk: 319MB &
- Size: 24.9 GB
WinDirStat (Test 2)
- Size: 319.1MB
TreeSize-Free (Test 2)
- Size: 25GB
- Allocated: 319.2MB
The files in the folder seem to be fine, I don't see any problems with the content. I checked & the folder is not a part of any junction, symbolic link, or Hardlink.
I don't want to loose anything by causing a problem but don't know how I should handle or fix this problem...
The system is:
- Windows 10 Pro (21H2)
- OS Build: 19044.2130
Image of Properties for Folder #1
Image of Properties for Folder #3
Similar Questions, all others seem to be essentially saying the same things as there 3:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45644974/how-can-a-folder-size-be-larger-than-its-size-on-disk
