If you had the photos in question professionally taken, it might be that the photographer, if they’re still around, might have copies. I don’t know whether they retain copies, but I suppose asking can’t hurt.
This place says up to a year:
wanderlustportraits.com/how-long-photographers-ke…
Photographers typically keep photos of their clients for a minimum of 90 days and up to a full year as part of standard practice; however, if this is important to you, review the contract and ask your professional.
This guy says forever:
old.reddit.com/…/how_long_do_you_hold_on_past_wed…
I keep ALL files on two 16tb drives drives. Those drives never get wiped and I will always keep two copies even when they fill up. One internal on sata for reference and one off site. When I first started shouting, I was cheap and deleted RAWs and just kept high res jpegs. I have clients coming back for albums and I am stuck re-editing the jpegs to match in the albums. Lesson learned. If you do want to consolidate, then keep the RAWs of the editor we jpegs and delete the unused. But that’s more hassle than the cost to store unused raws. You can also rely on cloud source but you never know if you’ll ever switch cloud servers or move onto another business on want to stop paying cloud fees. For the high volume photographers it becomes wise to invest in tape drives. HDD have lives of 10 years. So eventually all those old drives will need to be transferred to newer drives. Budget this into your bottom line
SteevyT@beehaw.org 1 day ago
I probably should have worded that better. I found the flash drive they were on. They are now on two mirrored hard drives in my tower, the flash drive, and a cloud service.