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Compressing massive storage question

piscian18

piscian18

[H]F Junkie
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Jul 26, 2005
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So I've got two 1TB's of Photographs in RAW for my work. These are redundant back ups that will likely never be needed so I'm curious can I compress these partitions so I can squeeze more on the drives? How do I do that?
 
On windows you right click on the folder, select properties the advanced and check the box that reads compress the folder to save space.
 
I think you could squeeze a healthy chunk of space out of it using Windows' folder compression.

I've never tried to compress a RAW image, but if it's similar to compressing a WAV file using lossless compression you'd get some decent space savings.
 
Compressing a drive is generally a bad idea, it makes interoperability difficult and if anything were to happen to the file structure it makes recovery nearly impossible. Also because RAW files are binary, they won't really compress much anyway. Try zipping a RAW file and watch it's size, it will usually increase in size after compression because there is no "fluff" in the file that it can get rid of through compression.

The best thing to do is convert them to a natively compressed format, such as PNG or TIFF, or if high quality is not the biggest concern you can convert them to lossy JPG's, which will reduce their file size by 80% or more.
 
Thanks it didn't dawn on me to use windows compression for some reason :')

These are redundant back ups I may never look at again. Just going in a box.
 
I dont think youll get as much space savings as you think. I just tried compressing one of my CR2 RAW files in 7zip for you. RAW isnt an inherently compressible format.

Uncompressed - 26,747 KB
7z Normal - 26,286 KB
7z Ultra - 26,287 KB
Bzip2 Ultra - 26,102 KB
Zip Normal - 26,333 KB
Zip Ultra - 26,287 KB
 
It depends on the type of RAW, some are already compressed at some level coming out of the camera so adding more compression doesn't help much.

One thing you can also try is converting to DNG, Adobe's digital negative standard (info here). Most of their tools support them and they also offer free converters. The format supports both lossless and lossy compression.
 
Best thing to do is move them onto some kind of optical media such as a DVD or BD.
 
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