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Can it be safe and/or useful to enable NTFS Compression to save disk space?
Question asked by Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS - 8/25/2021 at 8:54 AM
Unanswered
Can it be safe and/or useful to enable NTFS Compression to save disk space?

I wonder if I can enable it, maybe only on the SmarterMail storage folder....
Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins at SERSIS
Currently manages 6 SmarterMail installations (1 in the cloud for SERSIS which provides services to a few hundred third-party email domains + 5 on-premise for customers who prefer to have their mail server in-house)

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Kyle Kerst Replied
Employee Post
I have not personally tested this, but may be safe to use assuming the compression is handled at the OS or hardware level. I can set up some internal testing on this for you as well and will let you know what I find out.
Kyle Kerst IT Coordinator SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
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Thanks Kyle, I'll wait for more info on this
Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins at SERSIS Currently manages 6 SmarterMail installations (1 in the cloud for SERSIS which provides services to a few hundred third-party email domains + 5 on-premise for customers who prefer to have their mail server in-house)
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Hi Ron!

For space saving, it seems that using it with mail storage can save more than 60-70%.

On ours Servers we use only Enterprise NVME, so it isn't so cheap for us...


Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins at SERSIS Currently manages 6 SmarterMail installations (1 in the cloud for SERSIS which provides services to a few hundred third-party email domains + 5 on-premise for customers who prefer to have their mail server in-house)
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Kyle Kerst Replied
Employee Post
You're very welcome Gabriele. I was able to get this set up on a test environment where I have live data, and will be monitoring it for a few days or so to ensure there are no adverse effects, at which point I'll reach out to update you on my findings. Have a good one!
Kyle Kerst IT Coordinator SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
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Data deduplication is another thing to test, but I think that compression could work better because GRP and EML files are tecnically plain text files...

But I'm not sure, it's only my guess...
Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins at SERSIS Currently manages 6 SmarterMail installations (1 in the cloud for SERSIS which provides services to a few hundred third-party email domains + 5 on-premise for customers who prefer to have their mail server in-house)
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Kyle Kerst Replied
Employee Post
So far my environment is running well with compression in place on the drive, but the true test will be on an environment that receives email regularly and has connected clients. This might be better to test on a clone of your environment that you can use to do live client testing and long-term evaluations of the mail data itself. 

As to deduplication; I tested this a couple of years ago and found no issues in SmarterMail. That said, it was not as helpful as I'd hoped as there isn't a whole lot of duplication ongoing in these environments. This was also prior to changes to our FIle Storage system and elsewhere, so this may warrant a new test as well. 
Kyle Kerst IT Coordinator SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

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