How long do you keep Your RAW Files

<p>So this wedding season I have 70,000 wedding pictures on my Mac. I was wondering how long do you keep these files before you deleter the RAW files. I have given all my brides their final images. Once you Deliver the Final Images and the Client is happy do you Delete all the Raw and unused images from the wedding right away?</p>

<p>Never delete them. Why take the chance that you'll at some point have a need or desire (or better tools or techniques) to re-process something, and find that the $40 you'd have to spend on a big enough disk drive to keep them wasn't worth the cost?</p>

<p>What I was thinking about doing was backing up my entire wedding season on 2 different hard drives and putting the 2 hard drives in seperate locations then deleting them off my computer? </p>

<p>that's the way to do it (and maybe even a 3rd drive). I'd say keep it on the computer for a year and then copy off and remove from the computer. But you should be making safety copies anyway. You never want to be in a situation where 1 drive has the only copy/version of a file.</p>

<p>Sounds like a good backup strategy. HD space is now inexpensive enough to support saving RAW files in perpetuity, so I can't imagine why people would dump RAW files. But I can see using a system like this to archive the files and retain only the currently-active collection.</p>

<p>Sure you <em>already </em>(each and every day) have all of that material backed up onto multiple external, disconnected drives? Anything less than that is a major gamble with paid work.</p>

<p>Forever.</p>

<p>Forever, on on-line FW800 drives for a whole year and on off-line FW800 drives from then on. Since FW drives can be daisy-chained, I can connect whichever drive LR needs to read the specific image files within 2 mins and have my images back online for viewing and manipulation.</p>

<p>Less than a week. By then I have color corrected all the images, exposure corrected the images. There is little else I will do with RAW images. The images are then converted to JPG and stored on a DVD and an external drive. The DVD is taken offsite. That gives me three copies, more than enough.</p>

<p>What are you going to do with the RAW file that you have not already done before converting to JPG? I am not going to go back to the RAW file and rebalance an image that I have already corrected. That is redoing work that has already been accomplished. The JPG is plenty good enough.</p>

<p>Hard drive space is still one of the last cheap forms of real property. I would suggest buying at least two external drives. One backs up the other. Each drive should be at least a terabyte in size. These days external drives of this size from such manufacturers as Seagate and Western Digital run $100 or less. You should make room in your budget for this. Most importantly, each drive should be the same size. Makes the math so much easier. Copy everything you value to each of them, and then clear your computer. Make sure you back up every day, or each time you upload or manip a file, if you can. And, to answer your question, don't delete anything. If you have a good filing system, and can find your photos easily, there is just no need to consider file storage vs. cost. I keep shots now I would never have before, in anticipation of the next greatest software.</p>

<p>I have all of my Raw files since 2002 so I guess I will say...forever. Hard drives are cheap.</p>