Another thing that any animator can tell you is that we are, quite often, the most horrible packrats. Some of us are so bad that deleting a working file that hasn't been touched in a year still feels like sacrificing a firstborn child; there's always that sense of "what if" hovering. What if I need this file later? What if my main hard drive crashes, and the only way to retrieve the data is from the duplicate backups on my external hard drive? What if I want to use this old base from a 3D model to create a different one halfway through the modeling stage? The possibilities are endless, and can keep you second-guessing yourself until you're afraid to even delete a bitmap. (Or maybe that's just me.)
But there are ways around that, ways that don't involve spending a hundred or more dollars on peripherals or a new internal hard drive. The quickest and simplest way is to zip old files that you don't use anymore; using programs like WinZip or WinRar, you can compress groups of files as much as 75%, so that they take up a fraction of the space.
If that doesn't clear up enough space for you, however, and you have a rewritable CD drive or a zip drive, just burn your files to multiple CDs or copy them over to disk so that you can clear them off your hard drive. Just a word of warning, though: I'd advise making backup copies of each CD or zip disk. Remember, removable media can be corrupted or destroyed, and you wouldn't want to lose your files.
