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I plan to move my AppData folder to D: drive because I have more space following this: Can I move my AppData folder in Windows 10?. However when I try to copy the folder over before doing anything, Windows somehow shows this folder to be 558GB when it actually only takes about 47GB:

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I did a scan with WinDirStat to confirm it and nothing looks out of order:

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What is going on here?

Also in the SU article I linked above, there is no mention of copying the data. Do I need to copy it before running mklink? What happens to the existing data if I run mklink?

Update: compression is not enabled:

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Update 2: using some manual "binary search", I found out the file that causes the problem:

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It's not compressed as well but has the attribute "ready for archiving" checked:

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Luke Vo
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  • it's 558 GB of data that uses 47.1 GB of disk space ... compression is being used – jsotola Nov 10 '23 at 00:38
  • @jsotola none of my drives has compression enabled and even if they have that's a crazy compression ratio I don't think possible. – Luke Vo Nov 10 '23 at 00:41
  • click the advanced button in the properties window – jsotola Nov 10 '23 at 00:43
  • @jsotola it's not enabled, I added the screenshot. – Luke Vo Nov 10 '23 at 00:45
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    @jsotola not only compressed files, sparse files and resident files also have smaller file size. Besides there may be hard links and symlinks – phuclv Nov 10 '23 at 02:54
  • So I searched a bit about that file, looks like it somehow just "reserve" the space but does not actually occupy all of it. Unfortunately to Windows, that's the size and I couldn't copy it. 1 2 – Luke Vo Nov 10 '23 at 05:02

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