File compression manager

[foozball3000]

We work with insanely big data sets, and for some reason the company supplied us with only 80GB in our laptops. Anyway, as my proposal to investing in 320GB HDDs was declined, we need an alternative.
The only thing I can think of is a compression manager. Where you can schedule which clients you'll be working on, and overnight it compresses, decompresses, rearrange and optimize your HDD space.

Is there something available like this? Because I'm not too excited about writing such a program...

 

[stoke]

Insane!

If it's video, then it's already compressed to a large degree, and trying to compress it more is not going to work. Have you tried?

But, if it's something else, then, use windows and use it's built-in compression.
See : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307987 for windows XP.

To do it manually : Simply copy the stuff you're done with to the compressed folders, and copy the stuff you want to work on to the uncompressed folders.

Now, you've got to find a program that will copy stuff from 1 location to another based on some kind of logic or something. But, at least the whole "does it do compression" thing is taken out of the requirement list for this software.

 

[foozball3000]

The more I think of it, the more it seems I'll have to write our own custom software to do this.. You can easily write it in .Net. But it will take some serious planning.

What bugs me is that compressing a 25GB dataset takes some time... and as we're usually pressed for time, this can be a nuisance to decompress everything before we start working.

We're running Vista.. (for some reason)