It was announced recently that the government’s UFB rollout will be arriving in some Central Otago towns over the coming years, which is excellent news for businesses in the area, especially those (like ours) that depend on their connection to the internet.
“Fast” internet speeds however, depend on many factors, and even with UFB connections you’ll still benefit from reducing the number of “bottlenecks” in your workflow that may be slowing things down.
Transferring data across the web means passing through many different servers around the globe, and these have a large impact on overall transfer speeds.
To make your working day just that little bit better, here are a few tips that could help speed things up for you.
If you frequently need to send and receive images or video, you can reduce their file sizes by a number of means. Even smartphone cameras these days produce fairly large, high-resolution photos, which are often larger than required. Reducing a 4MB photo to 700KB is a significant reduction in the amount of data you need to send over the net and for many cases will still be more than adequate in terms of quality. An application such as Photoshop is perfect for this, or if you don’t already have that, we’re quite fond of the open-source GIMP (odd name, but just roll with it… it stands for GNU Image Maniplulation Program), which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Download page here.
Once you’ve installed GIMP, open up the image you want to reduce, then select Image > Scale Image. Enter a new width in the dialog (1024px might be a good starting point), and click OK. Then click File > Save to save the reduced version of the image.
If you work with video, you can shave off even more in file size, particularly if you using files from a Go-pro camera or similar, as these devices favour battery life over file compression.
A 4k file from a Go Pro will come with a significant file size, which can take a long time to upload to a remote server. Does the file need to be 4K? Think about down-sizing it using an application like Handbrake, another open source application that will convert and compress your video to a number of different formats. Re-encoding that Go-Pro footage using H.265 and downsizing the resolution to 1080p will create a significantly smaller file, while still retaining excellent quality.
Photos, PDFs, Word, Excel. We all need to send each other files day in, day out. Email was never designed as a file-transfer mechanism, but that’s what we often use it as, and it can sometimes be a frustrating process particularly with larger files.
To ease the pain, you could use a free service like WeTransfer.com to send your colleages larger files. To send a file, head over the site, click on “Add Your Files” and follow the prompts. You can enter the address of the person you’re sending the file to either directly on the site, or if you’d prefer, click the small 3 dot link on the bottom left and choose “Send As Link”. Using this option will give you a link to copy and paste into an email to your colleage, which they can click and download the file.
This is a much quicker process as it doesn’t put so much pressure on your email server (since the large file isn’t sent with the email), and WeTransfer use robust servers than can handle large amounts of data.
If you regularly need to transfer files to and from a remote server (perhaps your head office for example), there a ways to greatly improve efficiency in this process.
As one example, let’s say that you need to download a file from a remote server, do some work on it and then send it back to the server. The obvious process to achieve this is to download the file to your computer, do your work, and then transfer the modified file back to the server. This works fine, but we need to download the file in full, and then re-upload it in full, even if we only made one small change to the file. On large files, you can imagine this could get rather time consuming.
Recursive sync fixes this issue. With applications such rsync (which is used in a number of other applications), we’d need to download the file to our computer once. There are then 2 copies, the one of your computer and the original one on the remote server. Then we do our work on the file and save it. Rsync can then check for the changes in the file and update the file on the remote server by sending only the parts that have changed. The net result is 2 identical files, but significantly less data transfer.
From that point on, we only ever need to transfer the changes to the files to keep them current, rather than the whole file itself.
I hear you. And I also understand that I find this stuff interesting when most people perhaps don’t. However, a little investment in time and augmenting your work flow can often result in big reductions in time waiting for your data to finish uploading.
Then once UFB arrives in Central Otago, you’ll be well equipped to do even more with it!
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