Final answer:
Compacting is the process that rearranges objects to use disk space more efficiently, thus releasing the now unused space to be used again.
Step-by-step explanation:
Compacting is the process that rearranges objects to use disk space more efficiently, thus releasing the now unused space to be used again. It helps to optimize the storage space by combining smaller free spaces into larger contiguous blocks, which improves disk performance. Compact operations are commonly performed on databases and file systems.