Blue arrows on icons won't disappear even when I refresh icon cache

Question

I have some blue arrows on the upper corners of some files on my C drive, mostly on photos, documents and text files.  My shortcuts do not have the arrows. screenshot below.  I've refreshed my icon cache by typing ie4uinit.exe -show into my run dialog.

I use Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

As far as I know, my drive an NTSC drive, but I did certainly not compress any of the files, but not sure how to check.  The C drive is an SSD that is about 3 years old.

this happened suddenly and randomly. any advice much appreciated.

CLARIFICATION: only the icons on my desktop seem to be affected by the blue arrows, but other files on my other drives are behaving strangely, some of them have solid black around them, see screenshot below:

Solution 1

It's the latest windows update. They run out of space with all the crap they keep adding each time. So they decided it would be a good idea to just compress the user files to make room for more crap.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4023057/update-to-windows-10-versions-1507-1511-1607-1703-1709-and-1803-for-up

"This update may compress files in your user profile directory to help free up enough disk space to install important updates."

You can check if a folder is compressed by looking in the folder properties and pressing Advanced. "Compress contents to save disk space" will be enabled for some of the folders in your user profile like AppData, Desktop, Documents...

My 64GB windows partition can't keep up. I already moved the paging file and documents folder to another drive and disabled hibernation.

Solution 2

The arrows are an icon overlay, used to indicate that the file in question is stored using transparent compression at the filesystem level. This feature got added a while back, around about the same time they decided to move away from indicating the same thing by displaying the file name in a different color.

As to why this just suddenly appeared, I have no idea why something would have persistently applied transparent compression to your files. You can revert it by right clicking on the files, selecting 'Properties', clicking the 'Advanced' button near the bottom in the 'Attributes section, and then unchecking the 'Compress contents to save disk space' checkbox.