Is it worth it to reannotate your old OTB chess games years later?
Essentially, I lost my PGN file that contained ALL of my annotated OTB games, with no current backup. (I know, I know...) For what it’s worth, I did have a backup at one point, but apparently not for the last year or so.
In my file, I always annotated my games right after they were played so I had comments that featured things like my focus, or the environment, how I felt from playing this stronger player a few times in the past, and things like that. Not to mention, my annotations had my thought processes that I had at the level which I was playing. So my games when I was 1300 USCF had my variations, considerations, evaluations, and candidate sequences from when I was that rating. I feel like I lost a valuable and precious part of my game file but I think it could still be useful to reannotate the games and look back on my development.
I still have most of my games in various scorebooks and will recreate the file. I’m wondering whether it’s worth reannotating them as I do, or if anyone here has experience going back and reannotating their old games years later. Did you find it worthwhile? Did you get something meaningful out of revisiting them and analyzing them again?
tl;dr: I lost my PGN file of annotated OTB games from the last ~15 years. I still have most of the scoresheets and will recreate the games, but I’m wondering whether it’s worth reannotating them years later now that the original context and thought process are gone.