Recently in the great MacHeist bundle, LateNightSoft gave away an early release of their new software, Squeeze. Essentially Squeeze compresses and decompresses files on the fly to allow you to get the most out of your hard drive space. This is great for someone that is low on space and wants every ounce, but there is a catch.

Don't use this one a primary machine that you backup with Time Machine. Every time you open a file and Squeeze is called to decompress or compress, Time Machine marks the file as changed. Therefore Time Machine backups to grab the last couple of songs you downloaded in iTunes is now a 3-6 hour affair.

I didn't realize what was going on at first. I thought that maybe I was making changes, or my VMs were causing issues, but I never remembered it taking this long before. That's when I started checking LateNightSoft's website in their FAQ.

Toward the bottom it reads:

Is Squeeze compatible with Time Machine?

Yes. Time Machine will have no problem in backing up compressed files. However, there is one inconvenient. After Squeezing files, Time Machines detects that the, now compressed, files have changed and makes a new backup for them. So, your newly compressed folders will be completely backed up again. We are looking for a way to improve this in a future release.

So yes, it works, but not very well. Until they sort this out, I recommend avoiding it, unless of course you're not using Time Machine...then go for it.

On another note, I highly recommend their product Xslimmer. More on that later.