When one creates media, one ends up with giga-tera-petabytes of data. Client projects, personal projects, student projects fill several hard drives and I so wish to keep them all, but it’s just not possible. Client video projects that have long been delivered and data transferred to their drives or DVD media and follow up with “Is it all there? Did you play it to be sure it works?” And then the final threatening, “I’ll be deleting this off of my hard drive within the year, so please be sure you’ve checked and double-checked.” Because, as we know, once it’s gone, it’s gone. Hundreds of hours of work – POOF – like a puff of smoke. Empty space appears again and one can now fill it with more data. I really don’t delete the data for, like, 3 – 5 years which is why I keep buying new hard drives. Last week, a 4TB Raid showed up on my doorstep. I let her in and asked her to work quietly in the corner of my desk.
Naturally, I keep a copy of all finished work and even back that up onto two different drives and now I’ve got a cloud server as well in both DropBox and YouSendIt. Though they are really for temporary sharing of files with clients and students.
It’s just so hard to let go of the actual project work. The 20+ tracks of a band’s recording and mix session complete with elaborate plug-in punctuation, the 40 tracks of the D, M, and E of independent short films, the SD footage and the HD footage of various projects…
Alas, I must make that crunchy sound of the trash can chewing up the ones and zeros and spitting them all into the ether…
illustration by Tom Fisher for 1/12/13 article in the Toledo Blade on deleting extra data
