To delete or not....?

[Ant]

A question for all you imagers?

I don't have a large chip camera, so my dilemma is probably not as bad as some, but -

On a typical NB image I can end up with loads of files,

30-50 lights per channel - maybe 150 x 3mb = 450Mb.

51 flats per channel - so 153 x 3Mb = 159Mb

101 Bias files - 101x3Mb = 303Mb

That's just shy of 1Gb just in raw data... the 32Bit Tif's are 40Mb, so there is three of them (assuming that I only stack each set of subs once per channel). Then the final image.

Do you guys keep all the subs files that make up the final image.

Cheers

Ant

[Glider]

Yep, and slowly amassing a collection of 1 and 2TB external drives.

[blinky]

I tend to just keep the stacked up TIFF file and then my finished Photoshop files and delete the individual subs.

[Space Bat]

It is a problem and tend to do a lot of pc housekeeping and deleting lots of images and subs...

I do store a lot of stuff on a second built in hard drive just for astro but even that is full to the brim...so now considering an external HD.

Now the dark skies are back - will have to sort something out pdq

[Earl]

Simples, purchase a Blu-Ray burner.

[RikM]

For some images I keep the subs, for others I just keep the stacked TIFF's. It depends on if I intend to reuse the data and add to it in later sessions.

[Ibbo!]

Likewise

I must learn to delete the rubbish

[steppenwolf]

I keep it all, Ant which means buying external storage I'm afraid.

[Stephen]

External disk space is relatively cheap - 1TB (or 1000 images based on your figures above) for £50? Keep it all, you never know when it might be useful to come back and reprocess or add it into next years shots

[JimStan]

I have been deleting those images which have obvious problems. Shake the OTA , delete the sub, aimed wrong, delete it, etc. I see no sense in keeping a sub that I am never going to use in the future. That way, I tend to forget all the bad subs, and it helps me to believe that I actually am a pretty good photographer !

[ollypenrice]

I tend to keep the stacks. Keeping it all would be nice but there's so much of it!!

Olly

[Sam]

I keep the RAW images and a Tiff of the final processing. Given that 1Tb and 2Tb drives aren't too expensive anymore it's probably worth hanging on to as much as you can. If it's 1Gb for an imaging run then that's 1000 imaging runs to fill a 1 Tb drive - so that's about 1000 clear nights - yeah right! how long is that - 10 years if there is 100 clear nights per year.

Sam

[Luke]

I've kepy my subs so far on external HD, though I've not had as many clear nights as Olly!

[ianaiken]

Like JimStan I delete the subs with errors. For everything else, I hoard which is in my nature. Storage isn't an issue for me I got plenty of that. Getting subs with this cloud is the problem.

[James]

I keep everything that isn't flawed in some way. Over time when I learn new techniques I often go back I te beginning, restack and do it all again.

The umpteen gigabytes of data are backed up on my work computer.....

James