Plz Don't Delete
I made a post on my cohost about the importance of preserving your old creative works. It seem to have struck a cord with people over there so I'm putting here along with some replies I've gotten that I agree with. I'll make sure to link both the post and the user whenever I use someone else's words. I'm also going to imclude some screenshots from old profiles I had. (thanks wayback machine!) and a couple of the few surviving images I managed to recover.
I don't know how many users on Neocities are in that middle/high school age range, and even if you're not in that range still take this to heart. Please don't ever delete anything you've created. As someone who did ms paint doodles and made shitty youtube videos back when I was younger, I wish I still had them. I was a fool and did what I assume a lot of people end up doing and deleting everything because you feel like it's too "cringe" or whatever.
Now that I'm reaching my 30s, I regret it. I regret it everyday of my life. You have no idea how much I wish I still had my shitty youtube videos or silly ms paint doodles. I swear I must've had like, over a hundred videos on youtube that were just dumbshit like a bunch of pictures set to music or just like 10 minutes of random gameplay from some game I played on an emulator. Pretty much all them edited in Windows Movie Maker. I had a deviantart gallery full of just the most random and silly ms paint doodles. Just the most shit child train of thought drawings I did because I was bored and had way more dedication than I do now.
With getting older and not being able to remember stuff you did as a kid, I wish I could look back on any of these. It's all lost to time now. I have a select handful of ms paint drawings by happenstance because I was a freak and uploaded them to some of the weirdest places... but everything else is either dead links or just gone. So just a message from someone who made that mistake. I urge you to not delete your creative works, no matter how "cringe" they may seem now.
Even better, back up everything you can.
Give everything you make a date and time of completion. Write some notes on what you were doing before, during, and after you created it. Save it in the highest possible quality. Keep it all stored in a Mediafire or MEGA account with an email you know you'll never forget. And for the love of God, never delete it.
I figure you (the reader, not OP i hope) aren't suicidal or aren't in any position where your life is in danger or could be compromised, I don't want you to get the wrong impression that Netflix will make a documentary of you after your death and will need ever small piece of information. I don't expect something like that.
But just keeping what you make on back-up gives you something to look back on, something to compare with what you're making today. It's euphoric watching stuff you made in the past and seeing how far you've come, what mistakes you've remedied or what ideas you dropped.
Cringe now. Cry in year's time.
I am Old, and I can tell you that this is true
I don't know if it's because I didn't have access to the internet until I was 11, or because there still weren't many people on the internet back then (and of those few online, even fewer had a scanner, & there was barely such a thing as a graphics tablet), but for the most part I never felt ashamed to share my scribbles online - indeed, I began doing so as soon as I had access to a scanner and the rudimentary knowledge of HTML needed to build a Geocities site.
Very few people saw my scribbles, of course, so this might have contributed to the lack of shame surrounding them, but anyway -
I've obsessively saved almost everything I've ever made since the age of 5. There's one piece in particular that's lost, and I never figured out exactly how it became lost (my theory is that it somehow accidentally ended up in a box of papers for recycling), and I still think about it a lot and I'd give anything to have it back.
It was a video game manual for an imaginary game called "Hydro-Mania," a 2D platformer where you played as anthropomorphic fire hydrants. There were several different sizes and shapes of hydrants, each with their own special ability - there was a tall one that could jump higher than the others, a short stubby one that could squeeze into smaller areas, and so on. That's really all I remember! I'm not sure how old I was when I made this, probably 7 or 8 (it was definitely before we had the internet).
And so if I, someone who never threw ANYTHING away, can mourn the loss of ONE piece of my childhood art...imagine how you'll feel if you don't hang on to anything?
It's all a part of my journey as an artist!!! I love being able to look back and see how far I've come, and also to discover things I'd forgotten about and go "ha ha, wait a minute, this was actually pretty good, considering???"
So yeah - save your work, always 💖💖💖
I'm seconding this and adding on, go a step further than not deleting them, make sure you have them backed up. In order of most to least devastating, here's a list of things I made that I never backed up and desperately wish I could access/find again
• the three star wars fan films I made when I was 10
• the wind waker novelization fanfic I wrote at 14
• the legend of Zelda fan film script I wrote at 15 that was a reverse isekai
• the scripts for the edgy machinima series I wrote and only made two episodes of (thankfully I have those episodes themselves so this one doesn't sting as bad)
• the script for the feature length horror film I wrote about a demon possessing high school kids
Even the least of these are things I'd give anything to be able to look at again. No matter how cringe or bad it is, you will want to look back on these things you made and see what you can draw from them as you get older, and it's worth the extra bit of time you can expend now to make sure you have access to it when that day comes.
Also: backups. So much of the stuff I’ve made has been lost not only to time or intentional deletion but actually through accidental physical breakage. The SATA connector on a hard drive snapped once and I’ll never know for sure what was there. A lot of things got destroyed in a house fire. A lot of physical artwork I made got destroyed from a water leak, despite me intending to photograph it and never getting around to it.