A New Way to Store Simple Text Files

Abstract

In the era of ubiquitous digitization, the Internet of Things (IoT), information plays a vital role. All types of data are collected, and some of this data are stored as text files. An important aspect—regardless of the type of data—is related to file storage, especially the amount of disk space that is required. The less space is used on storing data sets, the lower is the cost of this service. Another important aspect of storing data warehouses in the form of files is the cost of data transmission needed for file transfer and its processing. Moreover, the data that are stored should be minimally protected against access and reading by other entities. The aspects mentioned above are particularly important for large data sets like Big Data. Considering the above criteria, i.e., minimizing storage space, data transfer, ensuring minimum security, the main goal of the article was to show the new way of storing text files. This article presents a method that converts data from text files like txt, json, html, py to images (image files) in png format. Taking into account such criteria as the output size of the file, the results obtained for the test files confirm that presented method enables to reduce the need for disk space, as well as to hide data in an image file. The described method can be used for texts saved in extended ASCII and UTF-8 coding.

Keywords

• Big Data
• text file
• png image
• compression
• steganography