600MB less is 3.8GB less as the remaining part of the file will not deduplicate with anything else. I am sorry, but there will be no compression as it will increase the storage needed for these files, meaning that instead of storing everything on 4x 10TB drives we'll need 11x 10TB drives, and backup drives to add.

I am however in the progress of patching up the ISOs which gives us the best of many worlds: We keep the files original, we keep deduplication of the source files and the total set becomes smaller.

This thread will be kept open, but I consider the case closed and the results of the poll to be a clear indication that the members want to keep the Win10 betas. So we'll keep them.

Thank you all for your input.

Whoever is complaining about them are just whiners.

Eh, I wouldn't consider them "whiners", maybe they're just people who really want that stuff removed, while many of us think it should all stay

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Anyway, yes, the Windows 10 betas might be taking up too much space on the FTP, but you do have times where you get new hard drives for the server, so it's probably not that big of a deal. However, hard drives are expensive, so storage increase can't happen all the time. Still, the FTP seems to be doing just fine with those betas in the repository.

I went with the "no, keep them" option.

Most certainly not-- but perhaps there is some point to not categorically preserving every single released build, since, particularly for Windows Insiders on the Fast Ring, we get a brand new build of Windows once every seven to ten days, and a lot of them don't have a lot of stellar differences between it and the build before it-- maybe pick and choose which builds are preserved, and which are glossed over. Windows 10 has kind of given us the sort of... wealth of choice that we never got with Vista or 7, where builds were drip-leaked by internal sources over years, rather than handed out to the public over the course of weeks.

I'd say preserve all builds prior to RTM, and then preserve select builds for each iteration thereafter, some more than others depending on if they have large-scale changes to the OS or not (like 20H1, for instance which has significant changes to some of the inner workings of the OS)

Tbh I think all betas before RTM and major updates to Windows 10 (1507, 1511, 1607, 1703, etc.) should be preserved and the beta(s) that introduced those changes.

Sure, but there is a large threat of the "non-chosen" builds having some hidden features that aren't present in the "chosen" ones.

I don't have an opinion either way with regards to nuke<-->keep, but I do want to say something about the deltas: While I think it'd be a good idea, I'd prefer to see something tried-and-true (and, if possible, open source to prevent vendor- or OS lock-in) being used. Personally I've never heard about that SVF format, though that may just be a coincidence. The one I usually see for things like this is xdelta. Anyways, before going down that route please at least look into what other options there are.

Xdelta is useless for this. I've used it before but it works very badly unless you group the same languages together, and even then it's much worse than SmartVersion. And I have not seen any other good options even close. And from personal experience open source solutions always goes only half way of what's needed (like with xdelta) so I don't have any hopes really of finding an open source solution that is close to what SmartVersion does.

If you can find a different solution then please present it but until we find an at least equally efficient alternative SmartVersion will do.. And it comes for multiple platforms which is good enough for our needs.

How about using SmartVersion? Are you satisfied?

I asked mrpijey if it was good because I suggested SmartVersion.

It works quite well, I've already started to patch up a lot of Win10 and Server16/19 builds and replace them on the FTP. It's slow, but it works. I have not yet updated the database to reflect these changes, but that will be done during the weekend.

W10 is boring but well... BA remain BA, so...

There's lots of websites we can download Win10 releases.So we can remove the Win10 releases here!
(By the way,Win10 releases are boring,and looks even worse than Win1.0!)

I think this topic has served its purpose, and the majority has voted to keep the Windows 10 builds on the FTP.

The builds will stay but will be processed and patched as best as possible to reduce the FTP storage footprint.

Topic locked.