To keep or not to keep

[sholio]

I'm cleaning up and backing up the hard drive on my main working computer today (it's a laptop, so this is always a ritual before taking it on a trip with me) and I'm contemplating my ever-growing folder of completed music videos. I tend to save everything, but I'm starting to wonder about the wisdom of taking up an ever-growing corner of my hard drive with old files for vids I completed years ago. I make my vids in iMovie, and the files are pretty large (generally 3-5 Gb each), plus all the clips that I saved too.

To toss or not to toss? The only reason I can think of for keeping them is that it would enable me to go back later and save/export them in a different format if I wanted to. It would also make it easier to remaster them with better footage, should I ever want to do that, but at this point the only ones that I have any vague desire to remaster are the really old ones, which I did in Premiere, and don't still have the files for anyway.

I'm reluctant to throw them away, and yet, the finished & exported versions are the important thing (the final MP4, WMVs, etc), and I'm definitely keeping those.

Thoughts?

Comments

[ratcreature]

I'd keep them, maybe not on the laptop but only in my external backup, but I wouldn't delete them completely. I keep old art files with a gazillion layers that are large (not like a vid but still) even though I also have a high resolution merged version and of course a screen resolution file saved, and it's very unlikely that I'd fiddle with them. One never knows though when it might me useful after all. and these days disk space is fairly cheap, even within my modest means.

[sholio]

Heh, yeah, that's the other thing I have in abundance: old art files with all their layers (or saved at various stages of completion). And I almost never go back to them. But I like to keep them.

Actually, I think this might be an excellent excuse to get a new external backup drive and convert my current backup drive into permanent storage, i.e. instead of reading/writing to it all the time, just do a full backup and then put it away in storage. I got it several years ago and while it's held up quite well, I'm starting to worry that it'll go down and take everything with it; there's quite a bit of stuff backed up on it that I don't have anywhere else (media files and such). But since it's still going strong, it would do well as a place to dump all that stuff and then not worry about it.

[tessercat]

I'm gonna go old school and suggest burning them onto neatly labelled DVDs and then filing them. :)

[sholio]

I'd thought about that -- I think what's making me balk is that it would take so many DVDs to do it right (even though I know DVDs are super cheap, it still feels wasteful for something that I may never use!). But you have a good point. I think I might either do that, or like I was talking about in the comment above this one, get a new external backup drive and use my current one for storing all my old media files (including those ones) indefinitely.

[rydra_wong]

Keep. I know enough vidders who've expressed regret at not keeping the old files and being able to export into different formats or re-master them. DVDs or using an old backup drive for permanent storage sound like excellent plans.

[sholio]

Yeah, I don't think a single person has said "Toss them! You won't regret it!" *g* And really, with hard drive space and DVDs being pretty cheap, it's probably better to err on the side of safety and store them somewhere.