Why I Keep the Original Before Compressing

I compressed a batch of screen recordings once and deleted the originals the same afternoon. A week later I wanted to check whether the audio had survived, and there was nothing left to check against. The compressed files played fine. I just couldn’t prove it, and that bothered me more than the disk space I’d saved.

So now the original stays until I’ve had a chance to compare. Compression is one way to handle a full drive, not the only one. Sometimes the answer is a bigger external drive, sometimes it’s deleting what I don’t actually need, and sometimes it’s compressing. I make that call while both versions are still on hand.

Archiving is its own small habit. I keep originals on a drive that stays unplugged, in a folder labeled by project and month. It’s not elegant, but I can find things a year later without guessing.

Naming matters as much as storage. A few rules I follow:

• Keep the source in a folder named for the project and month.
• Give both versions the same base name, with a short suffix for each.
• Put the setting used in the filename, not in my head.

So a pair might read interview-raw and interview-web. When I come back later, the two files sit next to each other and I don’t have to remember which was which.

Comparing is the part I used to skip. Now I open both side by side and check motion, check small text, check audio. If I ran a file through something like MOV Compressor, the result still gets checked rather than assumed.

The original also covers me when a setting turns out wrong. If a compressed copy looks soft on a large screen, I go back to the source and try again instead of hunting for a file I deleted months ago. That’s the whole reason I keep it: compressing is only reversible while the source is still around.

— Jessica Turner