[ale] copiers: one more thing to be paranoid about

[Michael Trausch]

On Tue, 2010-04-20 at 13:32 -0400, Geoffrey wrote:
> Michael Trausch wrote:
> > On Tue, 2010-04-20 at 08:13 -0400, Geoffrey wrote:
> >> I'm curious about this.  Must be a pretty large drive.  Think about
> >> it. 
> >> Just last night, someone copied a document for me that I know is
> at 
> >> least 200 pages. Further, why would it be necessary to retain all
> >> such 
> >> copies?  Certainly it must purge older documents to make room for
> >> newer 
> >> ones? 
> > 
> > Yes, though with compression, those documents can compress pretty
> well.
> > I know at least one copy machine that does scan-to-PDF, and it can
> get
> > 50 pages in about 800KiB, depending on the amount of whitespace on
> the
> > page.
> > 
> > Extending that out and assuming that such numbers are close to the
> > average, that would mean that a page works out to about 16KiB, and
> for a
> > 40 GB drive that would mean the ability to store (not counting the
> > filesystem overhead and metadata) 2.6 million pages.
> 
> I think you're assuming text based documents.   Certainly a lot of
> folks 
> scan images as well.  Certainly they take up more space and color 
> certainly that much more. 

This is true, though most things that I am aware of that people scan in
office environments are essentially line-art or plain-text (which is
essentially the same when it comes to a scanner/copier application).
Though the scans of such things are color and have noise, they still
compress pretty well.

	--- Mike

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