For some reason at the office we always overlooked the ‘compress on save option’ in max file preferences, and I was wondering if other people use it and if anyone found a problem with it.
It seems a win/win option because it reduces file server used space and “should” load files faster because right now I think that the bottleneck on loading files is due file transfer over the network.
We always use it, like you said it is way faster to compress the file then send it over the network. We work with a large number of files and have not noticed an increased amount of corruption or any other problems using compress on save.
I’d say we went paranoid about it in max 7 when we had a lot of scenes corrupted, we stopped using it just to be sure that this wasn’t the cause of the problems …
We just caught what I think is the first (and potentially major) problem with the compress on save… a lot of our max files (not all, but the majority of them in our tests) are getting corrupted when they are put into RAR files. We store the majority of our archived projects in RAR format, so we tested it and just discovered this today. Has anyone else had any problems un-RARing max files that were saved with the compress on save feature on?
We have WinRAR 3.42 -- it’s been awhile since we’ve upgraded, so that may well be it. I’ll look into that. I tested it on several different scene files from different projects and it occured almost every time, so hopefully it’s just a version error.