Image Compression

GeneO said:

seekermeister said:

I haven't been backing up my video collection, due to it's size (~1565GBs), because I didn't want to dedicate that much hard drive space to that task, but after looking at the compression options in TI, that could be reduced to ~898GBs, so that it would fit on a 1TB drive, with some room to spare. The question is whether compressing them would effect the quality of the videos after restoring them?

As mentioned, they are already pretty well compressed and, depending on the compression algorithm, could take up more space.

TI compression won't do much better than zip compression, so why don't you try compressing one inti a zip folder with windows and see what you get?

I took your suggestion, and instead of one, I tried 3. One .mpg, one .mkv and one .flv. The .flv had the best result, by compressing to 0.7447465429637659 of it's original size, but the majority of my files are of the other two kinds. Even if they all compressed as well as the .flvs, it wouldn't be enough for my purposes.

I then used TI to create an image of the same .flv, and the difference in size between the original and backup was almost nil. So it appears that using TI for this purpose is out of the question.

I suspect that I will just keep things as they are.

pparks1 said:

I keep multiple USB drives with my critical data, keep them offsite.

That would take a lot of thumbdrives to accomplish my purpose, and that would not be cheap, considering how many it would take.
I understand that you are referring to things more precious than video files, but that is my concern presently.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. Somehow I seem to always think of thumb drives, when linked to the term USB. However, if I were going to get another hard drive for this purpose, it would probably be an internal SATA, so that I could slide it into my external case, which I imagine would be faster on transfers than USB.

I found zip type data compression on my video files not worth bothering with.

No, the files are about as small as they can be. In fact, I need to reencode some of them to a larger size for the purpose of increasing quality. However, none of my files are in DVD format, so I would estimate the average size at ~.5GBs. Of course, some are much smaller, and some are much larger than that.

Your's has more versatility than mine, but I still prefer them. This case is now discontinued, and I had a heck of a time find a second one. Now I can move drives back and forth between computers with ease.

Newegg.com - StarTech ESATCASE2 Aluminum Dual 3.5" Drive Enclosure eSATA Dual HD Enclosure

p5bdkw said:

I think that you probably need to encode the video to a smaller size, or transcode to another format, with a dedicated video program. I too wouldn't bother with zip type compression on any mpeg files.

I've been using H.264 and audio passthrough in an MKV container and find near BD/Blu Ray equivalent in the 5-10GB range. Processing takes a LONG time.
The backup method is a tradeoff between disk space, processing power and how much of an absolute perfectionist you are.