How file size impacts response documents: Insights from the 2025 Public Records Complexity Report

The total amount of data Granicus customers provided requesters increased by 438% over the last seven years when adjusted for volume, from about 8,000 MB (or 8 GB) per quarter to more than 100,000 MB (100 GB) per quarter.

Previously, a set of responsive documents looked more or less like a tidy stack of papers with photos, maps and graphics, and written documents. By and large, these physical packets allowed a requester to thumb through the stack and have a reasonable sense of what was there and how it was organized.

Electronic files have completely changed the game of file complexity in the context of public records requests, covering the entire process lifecycle from record generation through to storage to review and redaction to transmittal to the requester. Emails, text messages, reports, spreadsheets, and more can be in image form (PDF) or proprietary formats like .doc and .xls, photos, GIS data, plans and maps, audio recordings, and the 800-pound gorilla: video files.

Why have electronic files changed everything? This blog looks at the impact that new technologies are having on the file size of response documents and the challenges this presents for fulfilling public records requests.

Technology: Sometimes the solution, sometimes the problem

Electronic files now create more thorough reports that also take up much more file space and can be increasingly complex, primarily because they contain so much more data — but also because that data is more inscrutable to the eye. Flipping through a 300-page printed document to get a quick idea of what’s in it and whether it might be responsive can ironically be much faster than scrolling through a 300-page digital document. Audio and video technologies have been around long enough that users have developed instinctive knowledge of how much information there will be to mentally process in 30 minutes of audio or video. But having an idea what a 30 MB .shp file (GIS shape file) is difficult.

But even though keyword searches of a 300-page electronic document can be done much more quickly than a 300-page printed document, searching for keywords might mislead users into concluding a document isn’t responsive to a request when in fact it is. As court cases have shown, “in many contexts, the use of keywords without testing and refinement (or more sophisticated techniques) will in fact not be reasonably calculated to uncover all responsive material.”

Technology is also allowing the transmission of greater and greater quantities of data. While the file sizes of emails themselves haven’t changed much over time, what can be included with emails has. Cloud technology now removes the limit on the total quantity of data that can be included in email attachments, and each single attachment with OneDrive can be up to 250 GB.

Imagine an email chain that transmitted documents of this size and went to an initial circle of people and then perhaps to many more from there. If the email or attachments are possibly responsive to a request, staff would have to figure out a whole system for ensuring that the documents being sent were indeed the same ones being forwarded on; whether any of them might contain information that would need to be reviewed or redacted; and, perhaps, if an attorney was copied at any point in the chain, invoking possible privilege. Staff would also have to figure out if any emails were .pst files rather than .msg files, meaning they were stored locally rather than on the server.

The ever-growing challenge of video

The mother of all large, complex files are video files, particularly law enforcement-related video like officer bodycam footage.

These files are huge relative to other types of files governments generally deal with, and the data piles up quickly. The Chula Vista, California, Police Department learned from equipping a few officers with bodycams that 30 minutes of video took approximately 800 MB of data. As a result, 200 officers would end up generating 33 terabytes (TB) — or 33 million MB — of data per year, a massive amount of data to try to organize and store, and at tremendous cost. Even with technology that compresses file sizes by 50%, it’s still 15 TB of data. The City of Baltimore chose to forego a body-worn camera program in part because it estimated video storage costs at $2.6 million per year.

From a daily staff time and expense perspective, the costliest aspect of dealing with large law-enforcement related videos is review and redaction of a host of non-disclosable data, much of it related to personally identifiable information (PII). These include bodycam video, as well as those from dashcams, traffic cams, citizens, surveillance cameras from businesses, and other sources.

A California Supreme Court ruling highlighted just how fraught video files can be for jurisdictions. The City of Hayward found themselves in a court battle with the National Lawyers’ Guild over whether the latter had to pay thousands of dollars incurred by the city to review and redact six hours of video requested by the guild. The court ultimately interpreted that California state law did not intend jurisdictions to recoup staff costs for redaction. As a result, the city suffered both the original costs, as well as the much greater costs for multiple court cases. Had the guild not agreed to reduce its request from 90 hours of video to six hours, the city would have been out tens of thousands of dollars more.

Large files dominate the future

The Pandora’s Box of ever-increasing file sizes and evolving technology to manage these files has been opened, and what’s escaped isn’t going back in. There is too much pressure from too many sides. Technology companies are bombarding jurisdictions with promises of tools to meet their complex needs and solve the problem created by the last round of technology. Citizens and elected officials are calling for new tools to increase accountability and transparency, and staff need to keep them productively engaged.

Creating more efficient systems for organizing and managing these large-file requests requires tools that are built with these developing needs in mind. Operations Cloud offers effective records management tools to help staff deal with these increased pressures.