Overview

System compression, also known as "Compact OS", is a Windows feature that allows rarely modified files to be compressed using the XPRESS or LZX compression formats. It is not built directly into NTFS but rather is implemented using reparse points. This feature appeared in Windows 10 and it appears that many Windows 10 systems have been using it by default.

This repository contains a plugin which enables the NTFS-3G FUSE driver to transparently read from system-compressed files. It must be built against NTFS-3G version 2016.2.22AR.1 or later, since that was the first version to include support for reparse point plugins.

Currently, only reading is supported. Compressing an existing file may be done by using the "compact" utility on Windows, with one of the options below ("xpress4k" is the weakest and fastest, "lzx" is the strongest and slowest):

/exe:xpress4k
/exe:xpress8k
/exe:xpress16k
/exe:lzx

Installation

The plugin can be built by running ./configure && make. The build system must be able to find the NTFS-3G library and headers. On some platforms this may require that the "ntfs-3g-dev" package or similar be installed in addition to the main "ntfs-3g" package.

After compiling, run make install to install the plugin to the NTFS-3G plugin directory, which will be a subdirectory "ntfs-3g" of the system library directory ($libdir). An example full path to the installed plugin is /usr/lib/ntfs-3g/ntfs-plugin-80000017.so. It may differ slightly on different platforms. make install will create the plugin directory if it does not already exist.

License

This software may be redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. There is NO WARRANY, to the extent permitted by law. See the COPYING file for details.