hi Teddie , and everyone
don't use the CM compress, use
Compactor instead (you can see details
here on why I recommend this)
hmmm, as far as I understood files do not get decompressed on disk when they are merely used. They are decompressed in memory to be used by the game, but they stay compressed on the disk I would imagine. Unless ofcourse they are changed/altered and thus rewritten to disk.
Only files that get written back to disk are then uncompressed on disk (eg. when you make a new preview in CM, CM makes a new preview.png file and the old one is overwritten. CM does not know it was compressed to begin with.)
So a regular new run of Compactor needs to re-compress the 'new' and changed files only.
If you were to not install new cars or make any changes to your cars , you could drive them all and your complete car directory would still all stay compressed on the disk afaik.
And even if I would be wrong in assuming that , it is even better to use Compactor, as it will take less time and save more space then CM compress.
EDIT : as a test I compressed my carfolder, leaving 0 files uncompressed. Then I drove at least 10 different car mods on several tracks , and did an analyze afterwards with Compactor, giving me this result:
View attachment 1339681
So this tells me that not all files that were used got decompressed (only the ones that got altered, like ini files when positioning mirrors etc. )
otherwise I would have several hundreds of Megabytes compressible after having driven 10+ mods