Compressed Backups

[SugarDude]

I just set up a Synology NAS and now have all of my pictures in one location. I was setting up the Hyper Backup to an external USB hard drive and the setup ask if I want to compress the backup. Any suggestions on whether to compress or not? I don't want to lose any information in my raw files.

 

[PhotoLover]

I didn't see any responses to you on this one.

While I don't have personal experience with Hyper Backup, I will assert that the compression of your RAW files will be lossless. No backup provider would implement a compression solution that loses data upon restore.

Adding: note that Nikon already has the option of lossless compression on RAW images if you have that set (I do). I doubt that the Hyper Backup compression will actually reduce the RAW file size much, if any, if they are already compressed. Same for jpgs of course.

 

[TurtleCat]

Yes, generally speaking compression on a drive storing images won't accomplish much except to slow things down. Your biggest gain would be if you have a lot of uncompressed TIF files out there or even PSD or similar files without compression.

 

[Calson]

The backup will take twice as long but require half as much storage space. In the past with data storage so expensive the use of compression was important, but this is not the situation today.

 

[PhotoLover]

The backup will take twice as long but require half as much storage space. In the past with data storage so expensive the use of compression was important, but this is not the situation today.

Hard to say what the effect on backup time would be. I think you'd have to benchmark on your hardware. Compression takes CPU -- how much of a hit depends on how beefy your CPU(s) are. But if you reduced the amount of data to backup by 50%, the savings in data transfer time could be pretty significant (and you save the CPU needed to move the 50% of data that is not transferred, though that's a modest cost).

But both TurtleCat and I think that if you are backing up jpgs or compressed RAW images, the Hyper Backup's compression wouldn't actually compress anything. So you're paying the cost of compression (for the photo files) but getting no benefit.