backhand VS Compactor

You can already do the very basic version of that by using Compactor. Essentially it uses Windows 10's compression algorithms to make your games smaller. A lot of variance between games based on what their files consist of, but I generally get ~25% more space on my drives. Of course, a single update to the game might mean that you have to pack them again, but it's still a pretty good upside with practically no performance loss.

This will also help.

ARK practically needs its own 500GB SSD, specially if you start installing mods on top of having all of the DLCs. However, it's possible to bring down its size massively if you use this software, it works exceptionally well in ARK, being able to reduce it to about half its size. For example, my ARK installation went from like 320 GB to 175 I believe, which is still huge, but only about as much as any modern AAA game.

You can chuck compact.exe at it by hand (use the /exe option), or if you'd prefer to avoid the command line there's my Compactor tool, or the venerable CompactGUI.

They actually don't compress it. Using a simple compressor like this one for instance, the size decreases by half, if not a bit more than it. Tested it with the base game and it went from 200GB to 100GB.

I should press on and finish my Compactor rewrite, I guess.

7zip, microsoft powertoys (useful utilities n stuff), hyper-v (VM stuff), OBS, optimizer (https://github.com/hellzerg/optimizer) (privacy stuff + system tweaks), compactor (https://github.com/Freaky/Compactor) (uses windows compact.exe and provides a GUI for a otherwise cmd based tool) also qbittorrent