Transparent compression on Android

Similarly to CompactGUI, transparent compression seems to be theoretically possible on Android.

These are the steps:

  1. Modify your android kernel to add full NTFS support via the NTFS-3G project. This has already been done:
    - https://www.xda-developers.com/full-ntfs-readwrite-support-for-android/ - https://superuser.com/questions/257267/is-it-a-good-idea-to-use-compressed-ntfs-filesystem-on-an-external-harddisk
  2. Insert the SD-Card into Windows
  3. Create an NTFS partition
  4. Create a /data folder
  5. Use compact.exe to enable the transparent compression features
  6. Insert the SD-Card into the phone
  7. Mount the NTFS partition
  8. Move all of the app files into their respective /data folder in the NTFS partition
  9. Create symbolic links for the app files

Boom, transparent compression on Android.


Before doing this, though, try this:

  • General cleanup using SDMaid 2/SE
  • Scan your storage usage using DiskUsage and delete big files.
  • Delete unnused files files from the Downloads folder.
  • Upload your files to the cloud, deleting the local copies and following the 3-2-1 backup rule.
  • Move apps to the SD-Card using Link2SD (also remember to modify the default-install location using `adb shell pm setInstallLocation 2`)
  • Buy a bigger SD-Card.
  • Buy a phone with a bigger internal storage.

Unless you have a need for keeping a gargantuan amount of apps installed all at the same time, there's no real use case for this lol.



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