Originally posted by JohnX In old school photography terms, for me RAW are equivalent to negatives, JPEGs processed photographs. Always keep the negs!
+1. I am amazed at what I can do with some of the early RAW's I have now that I could not do then. I have been embarrassed looking at ones I did a year ago compared to what I can do now with the exact same file. There are consistent improvements in software and your processing skills will improve as well.
You do not have to keep them online if you don't want. Move them to an external drive (or two) and delete them from your working computer if you do not feel the need. But I would not get rid of them. That does not mean I keep everything, I cull pretty agressively to get rid of obvious junk and duplicates, but anything worth complete processing to jpeg is worth keeping in RAW.