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.