Sure, but if they have to process the RAW data anyway, they could easily send an unaltered copy in parallel to storage for offline use. I guess depending on the

Sure, but if they have to process the RAW data anyway, they could easily send an unaltered copy in parallel to storage for offline use. I guess depending on the resolution & bitness, they'd want to downsample/compress it to save space. Heh, anyway its just pure speculation on my part. They probably have a good reason to do it one particular way...