out of space

julien

julien

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julien
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Hi,

im seriously low on hard drive space and until i get another external drive i was wondering what was the best option for compressing my RAW files to free up some room.

:)
 
hmmm.. personally i would just delete other stuff to make room lol (who needs antivirus anyway!)

having said that im not sure, i would probs load some onto a disc or a dongle. you should have a back up like that anyway, then u can just load them onto the ext. when it arrives?
 
I'm comparing WinRAR, 7-Zip and converting to DNG. Bear in mind you'll need sufficient temporary space to both create and extract compressed archives, so don't put all your eggs in one basket and create overlarge archives. If you use a Canon, I believe their RAW format already uses the JPEG2000 lossless compression also used in DNG, in which case there probably wouldn't be a benefit in converting to DNG or trying to compress further.

Here's some comparison data, showing relative values for time to create the (best compression) archive and the archive sizes relative to the original collection of Pentax RAW files:
compressioncomparisonci9.gif


DNG wins hands down. It can be compressed a further 2 per cent with WinRAR, but at the expense of several minutes processing for e.g. 500MB. 7-Zip claims to offer the best compression, but this wasn't the case for this test and it was also the slowest option. However, it's free and has a small download and installation.

The Adobe DNG converter: http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/

The DNG format is supported by free/low-cost software such as Raw Therapee, XnView and cPicture.
 
thanks for the info. i have an external that everything gets backep up to but i just wanted to free up some space on my master drive. the DNG option looks like a good one.

thanks
 
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