Snow Leopard introduced a novelty in her HFS filesystem that did not get much publicity: the ability to compress files and treat them just like normal files. This compression is enabled in certain applications of the system to reduce your disk space, and although Apple has made some utilities for the console, has given no option graphic to select another folder.
Squeeze is a small program that installs as a preference pane and works in the background doing precisely that task. Once you specify the folders you want to keep compressing them, analyze and process all your files. This task, since it is held in the idle time of your processor, take a while, but at the end we won more or less depending on the type gigs of files that are compressed.
The side effects of this application may be several. First, the CPU be busier , since you have to unzip a file each time it is opened. But as they say, in most cases only a small part decompress the file, which will remain in the cache memory and also the additional time will be offset by the lower number of data to be read in our relatively slow hard disk. We must also bear in mind that this application detects when a file is not ideal to compress (eg a video or a song), obviously.
Another problem is that file systems are usually very sensitive, and make a transaction of this nature can become corrupt the system on failure. In principle this is unlikely, since we are using official tools from Apple, as well Squeeze works on a copy, so that in case of error would be the original files intact.
The only drawback I’ve found that apart from this is that is not compatible with Bootcamp . That is, files compressed with this scheme can not be read from Windows, I suppose because the driver is not activated. The application works only in Snow Leopard because it uses the system discussed in the beginning, and costs about $ 10. Fortunately, these days we get so free through MacHeist so … make haste!
Official Site | Squeeze
Link | Offer MacHeist
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