Should you keep zipped files of digital kits?

I have often been asked this question and there is always some discussion on this topic. 

Let’s start with some background information:

A zipped file is a file containing one or more files that are compressed into one file.   This allows for easier distribution of many files and making files smaller to share.   The main reason why digital scrapbooking kits comes in a zip file is because it has so many files.  Since digital kits mostly contain image files and these files are already compressed due to the nature of an image file, compressing the image files into a zip doesn’t save any space.  So basically a zip file of images is almost equal in size to the unzipped images.    There are also other kinds of compressed file archives besides zip, like rar and others.  The difference is mainly the tool and the algorithm used to compressed.   All this information applies to rar files as well.

So what should you save?

Well, here is my process and the reasoning behind it:

• Once I unzip a file, I don’t immediately delete the zip file but I move it into a folder called let’s say:  “Zipped Done”.  The reason why is when I go to organize the kit,  if I see something is not quite right or strange, I can go back to the zipped and unzip the file again if necessary.
• I also have a process that all my digital kits get backed up automatically.  Once I know the unzipped digital kit is backed up and I have looked at the digital kit to make sure it looks alright, then I know I can delete the zip file.   But I don’t go delete it immediately cause that would be an extra step, but I wait for a while and do one big deletion (see next step.)
• Periodically, I go into the “Zipped Done” and delete anything older than a week or two old.   Because I know that everything I am deleting has gone through the above steps.   My periodic time is about every 6 months.  How often you do this is going to be based on a few factors:  the amount of hard drive space you have available and how much you download.

So obviously, by now you realized that I don’t save the zips permanently.   I know many people burn their zip files to CD/DVD to preserve them.  I wouldn’t recommend doing this for 3 reasons:

1. You aren’t saving much space.  (a digital scrapbook kit zip file is close to the same size as unzipped images in it)
2. If you have to go to your backups, you have to unzip all those again.  If it was a large collection this is hours of computer processing time. Restoring your collection from already unzipped images is much quicker.
3. And lastly it is due the nature of a zip.   If a zip gets corrupted, you can’t access any images in that zip file.  Here’s an example:  Let’s say you put all your zips on a DVD and on a second DVD you put all the unzipped images.   And both of these DVD’s are scratched in the exact same way.  On the zipped DVD, the scratch corrupts one zip file and you would be unable to unzip this file and thus unable to access any images in that zip file.   On the unzipped DVD, the scratch corrupts 1 or more images and you would lose those images but probably not all the images in the digital kit. 

Hope this helps you in coming up with a way to manager all your images and zips!

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