Macworld Forums: Clusters compresses files and creates space - Macworld Forums

Post your comments for Clusters compresses files and creates space here

Reminds me of DiskDoubler.

wardoggie, on 28 June 2012 - 01:48 PM, said:

There were several equivalent of this under System 9: Disk Doubler was an excellent one.
Unfortunately, when migrating to OSX, I had to expand every file manually, which I did not do. Consequently, I have files dating back to System 9 which I cannot open any more.

I therefore would be very careful about using such a utility now.

damla, on 05 July 2012 - 04:14 AM, said:

I used Disk Doubler from the beta stage on, and had lots of problems with it. The difference here is that, instead of using a proprietary compression algorithm, Clusters uses the compression option built into 10.6. That makes me much more comfortable with the idea of using it. At the same time, I have to admit that I'm gun shy after my experience with Disk Doubler, and given the cost of hard disk drives, I would probably get a bigger hard disk, or off-load some data files to another disk, before I would try this.

Stan

Yes, this is the DiskDoubler concept from OS 8/9. Even back then when hard disks were smaller I discarded DD because the space savings weren't important but the slight delay to decompress was. There is some good background on Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiskDoubler>