Escrow Size Behavior
Quick answer
There is no published figure for how much Asset Escrow changes a resource's size. Any claim of the form "escrow adds X%" is invented. What follows separates what Cfx documents, what people observe, and what might explain the difference.
Difficulty: Advanced · Affects: LEGACY · Mixed evidence — read the tags
INFO
Search: escrow size, bigger after escrow, 40%, grew, overhead, compression, why larger.
Last verified 31 August 2026 · Cfx Asset Escrow · Cfx developer FAQ.
Confirmed fact
These come from Cfx documentation:
- You upload a zipped resource. It is processed for encryption and returned as an escrowed asset.
- The encrypted types are Lua, YFT, YDD, YDR. YTD, YMT and
.metaare not encrypted. - An
.fxapfile is added to the resource and must be preserved. - The maximum size for an escrowed asset is 1 GB.
- Re-uploading replaces the version in your account; customers who already downloaded an older version keep it.
Cfx has never published an overhead percentage, a compression specification, or a before/after size guarantee.
Observed behavior
Reported by creators and server owners, not verified by us:
- The number people compare is often not the same number twice: source folder size, uploaded zip size, downloaded asset size and on-disk cache size are four different measurements.
- Encrypted files are less compressible than their originals, so a zip of an escrowed resource can be larger than a zip of the plain one even when the unpacked contents are similar.
- Packs dominated by YTD textures — which are never encrypted — show less difference than packs dominated by YDD models, which are.
Possible explanation
Reasoning, not documentation. Treat as hypothesis:
| Effect | Why it would change size |
|---|---|
| Encryption padding | Block-based encryption rounds each file up to a block boundary |
| Compression loss | Encrypted bytes are effectively random and do not compress |
| Added metadata | The .fxap and per-file escrow headers |
| Repackaging | The archive is rebuilt, possibly at different compression settings than yours |
None of this is confirmed by Cfx, and the relative weight of each factor is unknown.
What to do about it
Measure your own packs rather than trusting a percentage:
- Record the unpacked source folder size.
- Record the uploaded zip size.
- Download the processed asset and record its zip size.
- Unpack it and record the on-disk size.
Compare like with like across versions of your own packs. That gives you a real planning number for the 1 GB ceiling, which is the only place this actually matters.
WARNING
Do not publish an overhead percentage to customers as if it were a Cfx specification. If you need to state something, state the measurement method and the pack it came from.