this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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I tend to either act as a data hoarder, but most of the time end up being overwhelmed with anxiety about having so much data. Even when I just look at my personal photos, I just feel impeding doom knowing it can only grow and grow, it will never get smaller.

I was wondering if this had a term.

And coming from this question, I am just amazed by this community. What has prompted your interest in data hoarding?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

To borrow a term from the Wikipedians: "Deletionist"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There are people who will format and reinstall their os without copying any data… and they don’t have any backups

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

True, just encountered another instance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Minimalist, or just poor planner?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I always hope the Pied Piper guy will come and I will be able to fit it all in one hand. One day, one day..

To answer you - don't be a martyr of your data. Find a balance. I chose to save everything, but compress the hell out of it. I.e. I save all photos from my phone, but compress them to 1080p and <= 1MB Jpeg. Because I don't need the tiny details from photos, I just want to keep memories.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Oppenheimer 2160x webrip

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Data Marie Kondo? Does this Linux ISO spark joy?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

cloud service?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Destroyer Of Worlds

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Data consumer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

This is my wife. Until we married my wife would even save sms. Would clean everything she hated to have stuff particularly in her phone. It wasn’t until I showed her the benefits of having something like Google photos to easily search for things

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

An ephemerist, someone who enjoys things that are fleeting, temporary, out of sight and out of mind once they're used.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Yeah, the ‘you own nothing and you will be happy’ people.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I was just about to write you can spot them because they use spotify and netflix and other streaming services almost exclusively and if you ask them where that document is they have no clue and retrieve it from Excel's history.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

There are a lot of people like this. It’s probably not bad. Less to clutter your mind if it doesn’t bother you.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

There sure are and you see it in the video piracy community all the time. You have guys that love giant episodes, and then people download the same episode at the same resolutions that is 1/10 the size! I can't imagine watching a 200 to 300mb episode of a 44 minute show. Personally I would rather watch something on BluRay most of the time over streaming due to the low quality of so many movies on major streaming providers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

theres usually reasons.

First, people may still be used to getting charged insane amounts of money for internet bandwidth. Download limits and overage charges are a real problem, especially for phones.

Download speeds. Downloading a 4k movie can take hours where the 1080p could be a few minutes.

People may not have a ton of storage space. The choice is between one 4k movie, or ten 1080p movies.

There's no need for retention. You're downloading a movie for yourself, not for archiving. There's no need for the HD version.

Tech. If you don't have a 4k monitor, the 4k resolution is wasted.

Quality. Just because the file is bigger doesn't mean it's higher quality. If the show was produced at 1080p, upscaling it to 4k doesn't actually increase the quality. I've downloaded 4k anime that was upscaled from 1080p and it actually was worse quality because it had a few corrupted artefacts. Corruption on a couple frames throughout the movie because the upscaling wasn't done perfectly and you wouldn't catch it unless you sat to watch the whole thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

If you don't have a 4k monitor, the 4k resolution is wasted

This is usually incorrect in practice since 1080p uploads rarely have enough bitrate to match a 1080p monitor. Resolution is not that important, but bitrate is

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (7 children)

Yep, I had a friend that matched exactly as the opposite of a data hoarder.
I asked him why would he behaves that way, not even saving the photos to hard drives when he switched to new phones. He said he hate his past, and there's nothing to look behind from present time. He had only few of his sport car's photos, few of his cat's photos, not much photos even moments with his girl friend. At the age of mid 20s, he has at most 1GB of his valuable data to keep.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

He straight up told me that he despised his past

That is so sad :(

I still have all the memories (photos, etc) and when I open them I feel nothing but gratitude because even if they're not so happy memories I learned a lot from those experiences. We are all out past, not just what we like. "All sunshine makes a desert" say the arabs and they're definitely not wrong.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I don't think it's inherently sad. That is not me by any chance, but I am envious of the experience, in the same way I'm envious of buddhist monks who are happy with nothing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Doesn't honestly sound that surprising for the age. Give it 20 years.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Yeah, I once knew a woman who deleted her emails after reading them, back when it was more popular pre social media.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yes, someone who doesn’t data hoard.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What has prompted your interest in data hoarding?

Censorship and Memory-holing

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Alzheimers patient

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

The end user who frequently asks if their data can please please be retrieved

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

A data loser ? 😂

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

A data eschewer

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Someone who has everything in the cloud, except for their OS, so their device requires the absolute minimum of storage

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Every common user is the opposite.

They dont care about their data. They let others care about it for them.They dont check if their emails from 209 are still in their mailbox.

They dont care if the photos from 2020 vacations are in their new phone.

They dont save photos to their computer, ever.

they dont have their songs saved anywhere else than in their spotify.

They dont realize the vidoes on their youtube playlist are gone missing.

They let corpos manage their data and hope thae data will still be there no matter how they dont care personally.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Data Disposer

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

My mom has her few documents and photos in Google's cloud and nothing on her computer but bookmarks. She thinks it's safer because she's had a hard drive fail. I've told her Google can zap her account at any time.

I collect data I would miss if it were gone.

AI photo classification has nearly reached the point where we no longer have to manually organize our photos. I'm counting on it to save my bacon after years of procrastination on that organization.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

My pandemic project was to get a hold on my data and preserve it.

I got all my hdd from multiple locations into one spot some as old as 20 years, new hdd, setup freenas on hardware with ecc ram. I extracted everything into fresh RAID.

It was like, 10 tb.

Then, one particularly long weekend alone, I looked over it all, and I started deleting...

I didn't need system backups for hardware I don't even have I didn't need old torrent downloads under 720p, they hurt my eyes tbh I didn't need backups of steam folders I didn't need research and downloads and homework for high school and college

I was down to 6tb

Then I got serious: incomplete seasons, movies that I didn't see myself watching again, non-sentimental files over 10 years old, all the ISOs for software I can't even run in modern windows or have found modern software to replace.

down to 4tb

I put music on one hdd, and everything else (photos and file) I wanted to save, and it came out to 1 tb. I uploaded that archive to a cloud, and a local copy, and a cold storage copy, and I immediately regretted doing everything I did to setup a FreeNAS on purpose built hardware. It wasn't worth all that for 1tb of data. However, now I see that if I hadn't done all that, I wouldn't have everything I wanted to keep in a safe place.

I recently moved and got new hardware, I downloaded that archive and updated it with the new files and pictures I wanted to keep, and reuploaded it. Done, and I don't have data anxiety anymore.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

There are people who don't even bookmark web pages. They don't have a Youtube watch later list. If they don't read/watch it now, they'll think of it later. Or not, and it won't matter.

I'm barely a hoarder by the standards of this sub. But I want my movies and music locally, so that imposes some necessity.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Normal modern people are the opposite; everything on cloud no data on hand, except maybe photos and videos captured on phones.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

People who have every streaming service out there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

There's a thing called Obsessive-Compulsive Spartanism (a form of OCD) that could be applied to data or anything else. The presence of things seems to cause a nagging anxiety which leads to them trying to free themselves from things. This isn't minimalism per se. In extreme cases someone may buy something, say a toaster, then throw it away, then find they need a toaster and buy another one. My spouse has some of those tendencies and I am always saving things from the trash and sometimes even backing up her office computers that she doesn't even own.

Then there's us folks here. There's a theory that some of us have an innate belief that resources are limited and we must take advantage of the opportunity to get what we can now. Our anxiety comes from the fear of losing our stuff and not having a backup. This may seem perplexing to some because we devote so much of our resources to getting and keeping that stuff. For me it only becomes a problem when I know I have it but can't find it. Or realizing maybe I do have a problem when I find a brand new 16TB drive in a pile of computer parts that I don't remember buying, then a week later finding another one.
There's also the data curators here that find gathering and organizing beautiful and calming. Many of us here are bits of both.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

    My whife has similar issues with her photos. She has hundreds of thousands. She takes thirty photos of everything "so she can get the right shot," but can never find the time to sort through them. She keeps running out of space on her phone's msd card, and just getting a new one and putting the old one away. She six terrabites of mostly photos on my desktop (I gave hear a hard drive in it so she could use it for Photoshop) and none of it is organized.

    I can only give you the same advice I give her: you need to curate, and that means you need a system. A good system/protocol/routine should allow you to keep your data sorted and organized, and I strongly suspect that once you know exactly what you have and where it is, you'll feel a lot better.

    If your concern is storage, if you are not consciously data hoarding (in other words, you're not going out and looking for entire runs of magazines, TV shows etc.); a good curation system will ensure that while yes, your data collection may continue to grow consistently, I doubt very much that it will grow at a rate that makes it unfeasible to manage.

    If I might make a suggestion to begin with: /r/datacurator

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Most people.

Most people never back up and they prefer the convenience of streaming subscriptions to actually owning anything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago
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