Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
Gotcha, though if you go back to them with a "It will cost $crazy to store them as is" or "Compressing them will only put off $crazy for $smallamountoftime" then that may change 
Anyway, where does this all happen? I assume it's part of the backup process which means you probably want automated, is it Windows or Linux?
Either way you should be able to script something using something like ImageMagick, I believe it supports compression in TIFFs so you should be able to run all the TIFFs through a conversion before they go off to where they're supposed to. |
If the problem was just sheer space, it would be much easier to just get approval to buy more drives than it is to convince management to train the business to save money by altering practices that aren't actually a part of daily business operations or getting other companies and 3rd parties on board as well. We just get the data in and it comes in all sorts of formats.
The more nebulous thing is that it's difficult to explain to business why it might be an issue that backups take longer and longer every week and why that causes a serious disaster recovery problem for them in the long run.
Yes, we'll have to figure out the automation part of this afterward... probably as a scripted process that runs on the file servers before the nightly backups start happening (which is another separate process with dedicated architecture for duping/de-duping to tape, etc.).
For now, I'm trying to find a solution to test different compression algorithms in the first place to see what works best.