I forgot to reply to CCP4BB, but this could be interesting not just for Eugene.
Dear Eugene, I have a couple of questions about images compression and storage: 1)do someone use it in routine work and does it works well for them? ->Yes, in Utrecht we do routinely compress images (ncompress). Our data processing software EVAL can read those and decompress on the fly. This works very convient. It depends on the specific image format how efficient the compression is. For a discussion on image compression and data archiving see our paper in Journal of Applied Crystallography, 2013, Volume 46, pages 108-119, http://dx.doi.org/10.1107/__S0021889812044172 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1107/S0021889812044172> 2)I found this page by google: http://bl831.als.lbl.gov/~jamesh/lossy_compression/ <http://bl831.als.lbl.gov/%7Ejamesh/lossy_compression/> And want to ask about reports of usage of this program (of course if someone already uses it) ->The IUCr has established a Data Depostion Work Group (have a look at http://forums.iucr.org/), that is discussing and trying to establish the possiblities of long-term storage of diffraction images and raw data in general. One of this issues is lossy or lossless data compression. I personally have no experience with lossy data compression. 3)Is there any advice for long-term diffraction image storage? -> There is a policy issue to that. How do we get that arranged for diffraction data wordwide? For now, we have to find a way to store our raw data locally. It is certain that every storage system (like USB drives) will fail in the end. So without active conservation on tapes or raid systems, data will eventually get lost. Initiatives to preseve data locally are underway, e.g. example the Manchester University is setting up a data depository for raw scientific data, were all data will be indentified by a DOI. Best wishes, Loes ___________________________________________________________ Dr. Loes Kroon-Batenburg Dept. of Crystal and Structural Chemistry Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research Utrecht University Padualaan 8, 3584 CH Utrecht The Netherlands E-mail : l.m.j.kroon-batenb...@uu.nl phone : +31-30-2532865 fax : +31-30-2533940
