I went through a brief period where I ran out of disks and reformatted all my disks with compressed filesystems to eke out another 300kb of usable disk. Later I went back and tried out a wide variety of compression tools, I preferred .ARJ but I couldn't tell you why today...

You might recall then, that in those days the compressor just "guessed" at how big the uncompressed drive space should be. You could set it to anything that had sufficiently few digits.

This allowed you to put in absurdly large numbers. I had a 9.5Mb floppy drive when I first realized the number was arbitrary, but expected to be reasonably accurate given "typical use" (which was code for "not encrypted and not already compressed").

Of course when you used higher than realistic numbers, you'd just eventually hit the last compressed cluster and then your system puked while the software tried to figure out why it can't write the next sector.