A collaborator tries to send me a sketch of three rectangles in a hexagon. The file, however, is too large for our mail server which is configured to only accept attachments smaller than 100 MB. I inform him that such a drawing saved as a vector graphic should be just one or two kB in size, and send him this example: He replies: > "The new Figure was drawn in AutoCAD, which does not surport (sic) EPS well. So we saved it as TIFF." Uncompressed (and with a ridiculously high resolution), of course. m( At the first glance, this incidence may appear to be a classical example for Maslow's law: [if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.") But it's rather the combination of good intentions and essentially complete ignorance which is responsible for the sad result. (i) "Dr. B always told me to use vector graphics when making a sketch. Instead of this open source crap he always advocates, let's use professional software!" (ii) "Hm, the EPS export doesn't work! [1] What I'm going to do?" (iii) "Let's save it in one of these other formats. Ah, JPEG...oh no, Dr. B doesn't like that [for some reason](generation-jpeg.html "for some reason"). Something about compression." (iv) "TIFF, I know that too! And here, it states 'uncompressed', that's just perfect!" (v) "Better to chose a really high resolution, so Dr. B will never see the difference. Gnihihihihi!" [1] [PEBKAC](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEBKAC#Acronyms_and_other_names "PEBKAC"): the eps export of AutoCAD works flawlessly, of course. The guy has a PhD in physics, and yet the five orders of magnitude in file size somehow didn't register with him. Why do I care? Well, for one, I like things to be done efficiently and professionally, particularly at work where I do not intend to waste my valuable time. Second, people trying to send 100 MB+ files by e-mail are the same who complain about disk space all the time. Their 1 TB hard drive is "WAY TOO SMALL !!" Their 1 GB mail quota is "RIDICULOUS !!!!" Their 5 GB owncloud space is ... well, you get the drift. These people, which mostly belong to the 'Generation Smartphone', also seem to have an overwhelming need to access _all_ of their data anytime and everywhere, no matter how old and irrelevant these data may be. As a result, the amount of data we have to backup quadrupled over the past four years, and threatens to double again in two years. We are currently evaluating a possible solution for this problem, but whatever we do, it will be significantly more cost-intensive than imagined by the "why-don't-you-just-buy-a-3TB-drive-for-me" faction.