Old Data - keep or junk ?

[Eddie Jones]

Hi All,

I now have about 250G of old data filling up my data disk.
My skills and equipment have improved a lot since I started.
Is there any reason or benifit from keeping old data ?

What do others do ?

Thanks

[ollypenrice]

I keep the stacks. The individual subs would take too much space. (Stacking old and new stacks is not optimal but still works very well indeed.)

Olly

[old_eyes]

At the moment, I have kept a lot of old data.

I do occasionally reprocess, for example, redoing with Pixinsight instead of DSS where I started, or messing around with the alignment and integration steps.

Storage is cheap (compared with a lot of this hobby) and a 1 TB external hard drive is about £50 and a 2TB is £60. If you are not sure, I would spring for an extra drive.

However, I am currently weeding my sub collection and hope to reduce it drastically over time - to make way for all the wonderful new images I hope to capture!

So I think @ollypenrice is right. Save the first image after your automatic processes where you don't make creative decisions. Usually after calibration, cosmetic treatment, debayering (if relevant), registration and integration. From then on you are making decisions about how you treat the noise and 'artistically' present the image, so it is comforting to be able to go back and start again.

[Davey-T]

I've got data going back to when I started imaging, cough years ago, might even get around to processing it one day 😂

Dave

[sloz1664]

I've also kept my old data on the premise that a fabulous image processing software will turn up and process my images to a level that rivals the Masters

Steve

[gorann]

I always keep my original subs and all the versions created during my processing (with backup on a second drive), but I sometimes delete the intermediate files created by PI when calibrating (those can allways be recreated). As mentioned, terrabytes cost nothing nowadays and I feel it would be a waste of time finding files that can be deleted and I rather just buy yet another external hard drive.

[Rattler]

I've still got all my old data. To be fair I've only been imaging for 2 years. Some of the early data is ok and I've added it to new data.