To fulfill the request of a vendor, I need to squeeze our various years of Digital Ortho Photo Mosaics from 200 - 400 GB each down to 35 GB for each year. They want TIFF format. It takes many hours - I don't know how many, but more than 6 hours -to copy and compress a raster mosaic from our SQL/SDE data server to my PC. Around midnight I will kicked off the server as other data in the SQL database is updated. If it takes more than 15 hours it may not be possible.
The vendor specified using 'Create Raster Dataset', but an ESRI tech told me that is designed to combine raster data, not copy. That doesn't make intuitive sense - I thought raster images had to be sewn together. I've found little help online for this task.
Is COPY RASTER the best way to do this?
Is TIFF the best format? I thought JPEG or PNG were better compression formats.
Is there a non-iterative way to determine what 50% or 75% compression means in the final product? I can't believe it's a simple, linear equation; i.e., a 100 GB file compressed by 75% becomes a 25 GB file. But I could be wrong.
I expect a 400 GB DOP mosaic compressed to a 35 MB Tiff to be unreadable, but I was asked to do it, not question it.
