As I was sitting here listening to my ham radio and looking for POTA contacts on 20 meters, I took a look over at my camera gear on the other side of the room and got to thinking about all the photos I had taken with those cameras and how I am sitting on literally several terabytes of photos and video from the last several years of making YouTube videos, shooting street photography, landscape photography, motion blur photography, vacations, wildlife and all sorts of other things…
I have saved all these photos over the years and for no real reason other than you are supposed to keep them… but why? I never look at them, shoot for that matter, I never plug in the hard drives that they are stored on. They are just stacked in a storage bin next to the computer. What is the point in doing that? I could delete all the YouTube channel crap that is stored on the hard drives and would immediately have many terabytes of hard drive space available again.
But…
I have this nagging desire to keep them, until the hard drive fails on it’s own accord and not from my own hand. For some reason we can accept that fate instead of the fate coming from our own hand for some reason. “Oh darn! My hard drive has failed…” is an acceptable fate, why? Because we are absolved of responsibility for the loss of this data? I don’t know, but I am in that group. I just find it really strange how we cope with different things that happen to and around us at times.
What are your thoughts on this? I have been pondering what I should do with all these hard drives I have and I cant decide if I should just take the oldest one and format it when I need another drive, or should I just save it? You see, I am super bad at cataloging my work and back then I was even worse, there is some hint as to what is in each folder, but it is still pretty cryptic. I collected these images over several years and to go through them now seems like an insurmountable mountain of stuff to sort through. To the point, I look at the hard drives and then let procrastination take over and forget about it till later.
Anyway, this is a nagging problem that gnaws at the back of my mind all the time. I just thought I would see what you guys thought about it and maybe get some sort of solution. As an aside, I have no other backup of these drives either, so if one went bad, it is just lost data. Thanks you following along today and like this blog post and if you want sign up for the RSS feed so you will get the next one too…at least that is how I think it works, to be honest I don’t have any idea how that works…