Data compression for the first G-APD Cherenkov Telescope

The FACT telescope on the Canaries island of La Palma is the first Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope (IACT) to use solid state photomultipliers. It generates up to 2 TB of data per night which motivated us to investigate how to reduce the volume of data. Reducing the throughput enables us to efficiently acquire, store and process the observations data. This document presents the conclusions of this work, along with the implementation of the custom compression algorithm and I/O layer that is currently in use to operate the telescope.