E57 is a great format and very flexible, but unfortunately the support for it in different software packages can be patchy, so you may well lose data in the process of moving data between packages. There is a reference implementation in C++ for reading and writing e57 files, but it hasn't seen any active development since 2014 and its performance characteristics on large modern point clouds is not good, see http://www.libe57.org/ There is a more recent unofficial fork here https://github.com/asmaloney/libE57Form ... ANGELOG.md which has seen more updates but does not implement all E57 functionality. E57 can be a good option for transferring terrestrial laser scanning data where you want to preserve setup information with a view to re-registering or want to transfer photography.RJGEOMATICS wrote: ↑Sat Jul 31, 2021 10:28 pmShane from SCC Atlas Computers can give a far more technical explanation as to e57.
For archiving point cloud data, I'd recommend storing all the raw data in its native format as well as the finished unified data in an open format such as LAS, LAZ, E57 or PTS. The reason for storing the raw data in its native format is that transfer into any other open format is likely to be lossy. The reason for the open format data is that you can supply it to anyone who does not have a license to your processing software. Personally, I'm of the opinion that if you're archiving potentially huge quantities of data on behalf of your clients, you should be charging them an annual service fee for doing so as maintaining this type of data, either in the cloud or on-site, has an associated ongoing cost.
While I haven't used it to any great degree as yet, for storage of unified point clouds in the cloud or on big servers, Potree 2.1 looks like a very promising medium to long term option. The reason here is that the data is already stored in an octree in a format that can be viewed and analysed directly online with no extra import/export overhead. I really need to look at this myself in some more depth before commenting further.
As for the closed proprietary formats, many have 3rd party SDKs to allow transfer, which many software developers implement. In SCC, these currently include Recap, Leica MS60, Z+F and Faro. So while they're closed formats, they're not entirely closed.