File/Folder organization question

[Dick-Y]

I run W7 Home Premium, and have set up a C:\ partition and a Data partition on my biggest drive.
I use my 2nd drive for images. (I also take images to an external drive from time to time.)

I don't have a space problem, but I am curious as to the following:

My data partition contains 16,986 files in 1,758 folders.
I estimate 95% of these files are non-active, in the sense that I keep them "just in case",
for reference if ever needed, or as "duplicate set-up files."

Would things like taking images and day-to-day usage go faster if these non-active files were zipped-up,
instead of left as individual files as they are now?

How do other folks organize their "stuff"?

Dick

[JoeP517]

As with so many computer questions the answer is "it depends". Installation packages are usually compressed so compressing them again would gain little. If you have files created by Office 2007 or later that have an "x" as the last character of the file extension they are also already compressed. You do not have that many files. What length of time are you observing for the backup?

Joe

[Dick-Y]

Thanks for your response Joe. Around 4 1/2 minutes for my data image; 9 minutes for my system image.

Dick

[JoeP517]

You can certainly compress any of your data files that you wish but with the data image taking less than 5 minutes I'd not worry about it.

Joe