One of my faithful “dotted line reports” (a term I despise, he knows this, and likes to tease me with it) recently attended a large technical meeting with 350 other engineers. As is commonly done for large gatherings like this given that people are all remote from each other, it was conducted over a telephone conference line and a desktop sharing tool so that everybody could see the slides being presented. An obligatory moment for such meetings is when somebody asked for a copy of the slides and, not wanting to disappoint, the speaker said they would be sent out to everyone.

That turned out to be a mistake, seeing as the slides were 8Mb in size and the speaker sent it as an attachment.

To 350 people.

And then he realized he made a mistake and sent out an updated 9Mb version.

Do the math: 350 people * 17 Mb of slides = 5.95 Gb of file space taken up on the email servers that could have used up 9Mb on an internal website had a pointer been sent instead of sending the slides as attachments.

Ouch!

While it is a lot more convenient to send information to wide distribution lists as attachments, think twice about it if what you are sending is over 1 Mb or so. I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself, although not to the tune of almost 6 gigs. If you aren’t careful, you might end up accidentally using up %661 more resources than you need, as in the example in this story. Even with disk space as cheap as it is, that’s never good.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 1:29 pm and is filed under General Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.