I always wondered why photographers held on to negatives/raw files for so long. How often does the need to return years later come up, and can that justify the cost of storing all that in a way that’s somewhat reliable? I’m not saying there aren’t valid reasons to do so, and throwing the pictures on a few externals drives isn’t terrible, but to do it “right” seems like it would be super expensive!
Oh, I'd throw them away in a blink, If I were not lazy:
Almost after every shoot, people come back "remember that one photo, where I smiled at sth? I'm very sentimental about that, cause it's [some important thing to them]", which necessitates the need to hold on to every photo taken on the session. So no real deletes here, even if it came out technically wrong (blurry, blown out, etc.).
Those requests lessen, but don't die down completely. Especially with cyclic events, organizers have this habit of a asking for things done exactly year ago.
Some just say: "hey, I remember you taking a photo of me then and then" for their dancing portfolio in my case.
Especially for videos, which can be a constant flow of editing requests, for supercuts and etc.
Now, if I were really smart, I'd just have some good way to archive after two years, and delete after - let's say three years. In practice though, there are so many unforseen circumstances that a habit of "never delete anything" forms really easily.
It's just a lot easier and cheaper to buy another drive instead of culling 10k of photos every once in a while, especially if external confirmation is involved.
Totally understandable! As a service provider, you want to be able to fulfill those requests because it will make you their go-to person for life. Pretty cheap compared to the benefits you can get.
Despite constantly crowing at researchers in my past life that they will lose all their data ... it only happened once or twice, and both times was related to theft and not drive failure.
I wonder if you could sell a type of "archive protection plan" as an add-on to your work. It's like $70 a year to store 500GB on Glacier. I am sort of assuming each shoot is 500GB? You could guarantee access for those customers who want it.
If we're being honest with each other, I would do the exact thing you're doing and focus more on my business. :)
You could also back up to something like AWS Glacier. The cheapest tier (access less than once a year) is $1/TB/month. Maybe if you kept thumbnails locally, you could push all the data up and only pull it as and when you needed it.
Aaaah I see : - ) still, if it's only very occasional "do you remember that photo?" queries, that shouldn't add up to any significant cost. But a full retrieval - yeah. Interesting how the price ramps up!
Because better hardware gets cheaper, and one's technique and software improves over time.
I was able to recover a 13 year old photo I took with a D70s which was extremely noisy. By using what I learnt and state of the art software (which is Darktable), I was able to extract a very nice photo out of it.
Also, as your style improves and experience piles up, you look to your "bad" photos and say "Aha, there's a nice angle here. Let's process this".
You can see some of my "Remastered" photos at [0].
That looks pretty nice. I'll try to find some noisy files to send to you. What's nice about Darktable is it has a feature called "profiled denoise".
Contributors send in calibrated RAW files per camera, taken at every ISO setting possible, so Darktable denoises your file according to your camera's profile at particular ISO. The result is pretty impressive.
I have uploaded that particular image to [0]. Taken in 2006 and processed in 2020, after 14 years!
