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I don't know how many users on Cohost 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, 30-40 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.
As someone who has been drawing (almost) daily since 2011 and was very much into drawing and art before that, I can't stress enough that you should maintain a local (not cloud, not platform-based) backup of your work on top of not deleting it. Buy a cheap HDD on sale, plug it in to make a backup every week or every month, and put it in storage after. Hell, buy two and have a daily backup.
Both because Platforms are Not Your Friends, and because from personal experience, you're gonna want to revisit those old works, and it leaves you a little hollow if they're gone for good.
At some point I lost most of the original files for my art from before mid-2018 because I didn't have an archive of them on my PC. Somewhere along the line I must have lost track of where the backup was. My best guess is it was on a HDD that was wiped and re-used, thinking that I still had the files on my PC, or maybe they were on a drive that had a mechanical failure; I've searched through everything I have, but I can't find those old files anywhere.
I have some form most of what I put online at the time via DeviantArt and Tumblr, but anything I didn't post is likely totally lost, including plenty of sketches and other ideas that were never posted anywhere. Things that were reflective of where I was. It feels awful not to be able to revisit the originals to re-export them or look through what I was working on at the time.
What I do have, at least, I can look back on fondly now. The barrier of cringe is far behind me, I don't see mistakes in my old art so much as the steps that resulted in where I am now, the learning that got me here and will take me forward. Just do what you can to preserve your stuff, because you'll definitely miss it if it's gone.
I don't know how many users on Cohost 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, 30-40 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.