Anyone know what the blue color in the folder/filer names symbolize?
<<Edit: Image resized for better fit>>
Message Edited by JerryM on 10-09-2009 09:31 AM
Hi mdoc 7
I believe those are the items that have been quarantined by Norton's.
Blue text denotes a folder or file that has been compressed to save disk space. This is true of any folder on your system that has been compressed, not just the QBackup folder.
You're right, the folder is compressed as indicated by this box from the properties here:
Question now is what are the parameters that caused this QBackup dir to be compressed? I didn't do this. Apparently it was done automatically or it was done on installation of NIS. About 19% of my HD is freespace.
Mine are also compressed. Must be a Norton thing.
Cool. Thanks.
They are compressed because compressed files can “lock in” their contents. If the Quarantined files are malware then by compressing the folder, Norton locks the malware in an inactive state.
dbrisendine wrote:
They are compressed because compressed files can "lock in" their contents. If the Quarantined files are malware then by compressing the folder, Norton locks the malware in an inactive state.
Suppose the rest of my drive is compressed. Are the malware still locked inactive?
Yes. The Qbackup files are encrpyted and compressed. Norton encpryts them so they can not be accidently opened by something else. Any unzip / uncompress utility can open / expand compressed files but then they (the utilities) could not get past the encryption.
Compressing your entire drive will save you drive space but slow you system down considerably as the OS has to expand files and then recompress them when they are no longer in use.
I would tend to disagree with dbrisendine there. NTFS compression is transparent to the file system and neither the user nor any other application 'notice' the compression or are in any way 'blocked' by it. NTFS compressed files are uncompressed 'on the fly' on the system level.
I'd be inclined to think that the Quarantine is compressed simply for the sake of saving disk space.
Hi
I have zip files in my computer which are compressed and they aren't blue. The only blue one I have noticed is the Qbackup folder. It may have more to do with the encryption part than the compressed part.
As I've written before, these are NTFS compressed files.
File compression
NTFS can compress files using a variant of the LZ77 algorithm (also used in the popular ZIP file format). Although read-write access to compressed files is transparent, Microsoft recommends avoiding compression on server systems and/or network shares holding roaming profiles because it puts a considerable load on the processor.
Single-user systems with limited hard disk space will probably use NTFS compression successfully. The slowest link in a computer is not the CPU but the speed of the hard drive, so NTFS compression allows the limited, slow storage space to be better used, in terms of both space and (often) speed. NTFS compression can also serve as a replacement for sparse files when a program (e.g. a download manager) is not able to create files without content as sparse files.