Tip for recovering HD space

oshead

I was running out of space on my laptop and backup drives. After checking the contents of my drives I realised that over 250GB were being taken up by RAW files. I did a little search on the interweb for a solution. Here's what I did, simple but effective.

Using Lightroom, I converted all my files to DNG (digital negative) format. This is an open, digital file archival format developed by Adobe. It is a lot more efficient at storing the data image, with lossless compression as high as 40% in some cases. This format is the standard archival format, so is quite possibly, the most future proof image data format available at this point in time.

Now my image store has gone from a whooping 250GB down to 165GB. That's a full 85GB of recovered space.

Dave OS

davmigil

Didn't realise the lossless compression they use saves so much space. Good tip. And for those who don't have Lightroom, Adobe have a free RAW to DNG utility on their website

democrates

Thanks a million OSHead and davmigil!

Just compressed some old 450d CR2 files to 86.6%.
The really big win is the widespread interoperability of the DNG format, just tested aok with GIMP and qtpfsgui (hdr), I'd actually live with bigger files for that so smaller is icing on the cake.

PS any Linux heads the win download linked by davmigil runs flawlessly under wine.

oshead

Actually, just for the record. I double checked the recovered space, It wasn't 65GB but 45GB. My bad.... . Still not bad. Thats a bit more than 20% reduction of used space.