How often do you delete files of your soundlibrary?

Question

I wonder, if I am the only person who sometimes feels, that previously edited reordings or soundeffects are not that good as you thought they would be. Lately I went through all of my edited material and while most of them were good or ok, some of them were just bad. I tried to fix them, but after a short time I gave up and deleted them.

So my question is: do you go through your material from time to time and get rid of bad samples or do you keep everthing you made?

Answer 1

That would be never. Even noisy, poor recordings of interesting things take on different meanings and uses when you listen to them months, or sometimes years, later. As one's techniques and equipment/software improves, sometimes older recordings can be salvaged with better plug-ins or, more likely, more refined techniques.

Hard drive space is cheap. Time to re-record things is not. I never delete any old raw files or sessions, ever.

Answer 2

I agree with @NoiseJockey. I would buy an external hard drive if you need the space, copy all the data across and keep it safe, you never know when you might need them.

Answer 3

Keep everything - you never know the context under which they might be useful....