Four years of delivered client footage on a shelf of drives — what do people actually keep, and for how long?

Stop making this decision per job and put it in the contract. That single change removes the anxiety, because the reason you keep everything is that deleting is an unbounded risk with no counterparty — and a retention clause bounds it.

Mine says, in plain words: raw footage is kept for a defined period after delivery, after which it is deleted unless the client has paid for archival. Project files and the delivered masters are kept longer.

What that does:

• It makes deletion a policy rather than a judgement, so you are not weighing each shoot on its own
• It makes archival a service you can charge for, which is the honest framing — storing someone's footage for years is a real cost you are currently absorbing silently
• It gives you a defensible answer when someone asks two years later, instead of a search through a shelf

A year for raw is a common choice and it comfortably covers the re-edit case you described. The clients who genuinely need longer will pay for it, and that conversation is much easier to have at signing than after a request.

The other half is what you keep forever, which is small and cheap: the final delivered files and the project file with its assets. Those are a rounding error in storage terms and they cover most of what people actually come back for.

On the shelf of drives specifically: what you have is not a backup, it is a single copy of each job on a consumer drive with no verification. That is the thing to fix before deciding what to keep, because the current situation quietly loses work whether or not you have a policy.

The boring scheme that works: three copies, on two different kinds of media, one of them off site. For a one-person operation that is realistically a working drive, a second drive that mirrors it, and either a cloud archive tier or a drive that lives somewhere else. The off-site copy is the one that covers the things a shelf does not — theft, fire, water.

Two things people skip that matter more than the scheme:

Verify after copying. A checksum comparison, not a file count. Silent corruption on a copy is real and you find out about it when you need the file, which is the worst possible moment.

Spin the old drives up on a schedule. A drive that sits untouched for four years is a coin toss. Once or twice a year, plug each in, check it mounts, check a few files open. This is also how you discover which two are duplicates.

And index it. A plain text file or a spreadsheet listing drive name, client, date and job is enough — the evening you lost was an indexing problem, not a storage one.