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What you’re describing is data hoarding. I pirate a ton too, but you know what I do with a movie or TV show after I’ve watched it? I delete it. Poof, gone. But

What you’re describing is data hoarding. I pirate a ton too, but you know what I do with a movie or TV show after I’ve watched it? I delete it. Poof, gone. But it’s still in the most important dataset I have. My memory. To help with the metadata of my own memory, I write down a list of the films I’ve seen. I only keep the movies I really love and want to rewatch (Robocop). That TV show I just finished that was great but I won’t rewatch. Boom, gonzo. Your piracy is an excuse for data hoarding, which is a problem.

sophacles 4y ago
> Your piracy is an excuse for data hoarding, which is a problem. Your fake concern an excuse for busy-bodying, which is a problem.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  I mean, what's wrong with data hoarding? People always say you should have backups, but when you make some proper ones it's suddenly "hoarding" and "a problem" smh.
  - dubswithus 4y ago
    Who is claiming that you must have backups of pirated content?
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      People. It's written right there.
- dubswithus 4y ago
  How is it that? OP is the one that shared. No one is forcing him to post here.
  - sophacles 4y ago
    Did OP ask if it was a problem? Did OP state it was a problem? Not that I see - AFAICT the only people declaring it a problem are the busybodies latching on to OP spending the same amount on this hobby as they would dining out at a decent restaurant once a month.
    - Supermancho 4y ago
      > Did OP state it was a problem? The title ascribes it to "piracy" costs, which is incorrect. GL with whatever.
      - sophacles 4y ago
        The title is > Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content That doesn't say it's a problem. It's a statement of fact. You are projecting a problem onto it. I pay more for dinner out than I would if signed up for HelloFresh to be delivered to my house. What if I like eating out? What if neither cost has any meaningful impact on my bottom line? Is that a problem too?
hestefisk 4y ago
I’d buy that for a dollar!
l33t2328 4y ago
In what sense is data hoarding a problem? I’ve only ever heard the term used in jest, at least partially, and in particular not ever with the same severity that actual hoarding receives.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Well it's costing this guy $45 a month apparently.
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    $45 a month is a pretty cheap vice as far as things go, though. You could easily be spending $45 a month just on streaming services.
    - colinmhayes 4y ago
      Or he could spend $10 on the tracker, $10 to run a normal computer without 30 drives, and still watch all the same stuff for half the price.
      - pirate-Loo6uoDu 4y ago
        Maybe there are better usenet services that don't get holes punched in their collections as much, but generally on usenet you get missing episodes over time.
      - bluefirebrand 4y ago
        My interpretation of your original post was that you were saying spending $45 a month on this project illustrated that he has a problem. Is that accurate? How does the fact that he could be saving money support that?
        4y ago
300bps 4y ago
I rewatch things all the time. If I’m doing side work at night and just want something on the background I’ll put on a movie or show that I’ve seen before. Beyond that, hard drives are cheap! I have a single 18 TB disk in my main computer that runs Plex. It lets me and my kids watch content from anywhere with an Internet connection. 18 TB hard drives are about $300.
- mitchdoogle 4y ago
  A single terabyte can hold at least 500 hours of 1080p video. A few terabytes is plenty to keep a large library of rewatchable content AND download new stuff frequently (and delete it when you need room)
- Feritiuuu 4y ago
  After 4tb dlof data I started to get weirded out by running too big disks. Resilvering might take ages. So long that raid2 might be mandatory. I haven't calculated the right risk factor but I still only use 4tb disks
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    Eh I recently switched to two 14tb disks of different manufacturers. One is usually in standby and once a week I do a rsync to it. Btrfs on both for checksums. Good enough for me, I assume it's way more likely that a PSU failure fries them all, in which case no variant of raid would have helped anyways. For important stuff I have an off-site Backup, but that's only around 800gb anyways and growing a few gb per year.
  - katbyte 4y ago
    A rebuild of a 160tb raid 6 array of 12 18tb disks for me takes around 3.3 days.
- bityard 4y ago
  > Beyond that, hard drives are cheap! I have a single 18 TB disk Fair warning: It is very dangerous to make statements like this in a public forum like this. You run the risk of someone spotting it and making a seemingly-innocent reply along the lines of, "Oh, you should at LEAST have TWO disks set up as a mirror so you don't lose all your movies when (not if, but when) the disk dies." And then someone else will say, "LOL u noob, RAID not a backup!" Another participant will assure you that no data is safe unless it's stored at on at least a 5-disk ZFS array. And then someone else will jump in to point out that even ZFS is not safe if you're not running ECC memory. And course you can't just have ONE of these ECC-enabled 5-disk ZFS-breathing monsters, because every component ASIDE from the disks is a single point of failure, so you'd better have TWO just to be safe. Which means you'll need a UPS because sudden power loses are _awesome_ if you like having your platters scribbled all over by a browned-out disk controller. And what exactly is your disaster recovery plan in the event of a fire or flood, gotta have some infra running in good health off-site in case something like that happens. And so on. Of course if you dig far enough into these admonitions and suggestions, the good news is that you won't have the time to watch any of those movies.
gkop 4y ago
The data is currency though, in the pirate economy.
- kyawzazaw 4y ago
  Only if you can transfer/exchange it, no?
  - colpabar 4y ago
    Good pirates seed forever.
- liotier 4y ago
  Sharing content you enjoy feels good - piracy reinforce social bonds !
temp8964 4y ago
> data hoarding, which is a problem. Data hoarding is not a problem. It's a hobby. Everyone needs a hobby, most hobbies cost money. Traveling? Cost money. Woodworking? Cost money. Photography? Cost money. Biking? Cost money. Gaming? Cost money (+ way more time). Data hoarding is just a hobby like others. Plus data hoarding can have great value, if you choose to hoard good content.
- philistine 4y ago
  Any hobby can turn into a problem. I'm quick to judge the data hoarders, because I absolutely do not consider myself one, but it can absolutely be a benign hobby. That being said, a 45$ a month electricity bill directly related to the hard drives, that's a lot of dough for making a number go up.
  - temp8964 4y ago
    Hard drives can be turned to sleep when they are not being accessed. If you do that, the electricity cost will be very low. There is a believe that this will damage the hard drives. I am not sure how valid it is.
  - A7C3D5 4y ago
    This seems to suggests that data hoarders mainly derive their satisfaction from actually filling up a hard drive. For me, the satisfaction is from having instant access to organized libraries of music and video of generally far higher fidelity than you can stream with current technology. There are currently no streaming services that can stream UHD 4k movies at a quality that is close to even a normal 1080p blu ray never mind an actual UHD blu ray. I'm very into film and the difference in video and sound quality, which most people will not notice or care about, is pretty significant to me. An uncompressed BR rip is 30-100 GB so even a fairly curated library can quickly outgrow drive space that most people couldn't fathom a sane person using. I have probably filled at least 60TB of drives in the past year alone since my ISP has been ignoring data caps, and that is besides the large amount that IS deleted, as I do not archive anything that's been lossily compressed after being ripped unless a higher quality version does not publicly exist. I "hoard" TOSEC libraries for every conceivable console and consumer computer system from ~1970 up to the PS3, but don't archive PC games past the DOS era, because Steam exists as a better service than I can provide for myself, so I use that. There is no equivalent service for music or film or Amiga games.
Freeboots 4y ago
Same. I keep the previous episode of a show until i get the next, to remind me what shows im watching and where im up to, but typically dont hang onto anything. These days the cost of downloading something again is less than the cost of hanging onto it just in case i maybe want to rewatch (usually years later).
zinodaur 4y ago
Good thing you have all those "data hoarders" to leech off of when you wanna download something tho...
- pyhtel 4y ago
  He's using usenet, I highly doubt he's seeding the data he holds
- omnimus 4y ago
  Great that they are so obsessive. I think its fair if you seed enough and then get off and delete.
- Mo3 4y ago
  He's on usenet, not torrenting. No need to keep or seed anything. OP is hoarding and attributing negative consequences of his own decision to a concept itself.
  - Cyph0n 4y ago
    And who do you think reuploads stuff after DMCA/NTD takedowns?
    - Mo3 4y ago
      Im aware some people are busy hoarding data and providing it back to the ecosystem in these cases, but I fail to understand why or how the cost of this personal decision is in any way related to the cost of piracy, or why someone with this hobby would feel the need to complain about it, or publicly associate these costs with piracy itself. That’s illogical. It’s like mirroring Wikipedia on S3 and then publicly stating or even complaining that using Wikipedia costs hundreds of dollars.
      - pirate-Loo6uoDu 4y ago
        My copy of wikipedia is less than 100GB at the moment.
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
> really love and want to rewatch (Robocop) You mean Dredd 2012. "Are you ready?" "Yes." "You don't look ready." Absolutely the best performance of Olivia Thirlby, although of course Karl Urban was great, too.
- philistine 4y ago
  Bitches leave.
georgeecollins 4y ago
I don't pirate, I pay for content, but I like to own a digital copy of music content. So I buy MP3s rather than subscribe to a service. It's probably strange-- and maybe dumb-- but I feel like in the long run I never know what will happen to a service in terms of how it may change in price or quality. If I own a CD or an MP3, I know I have what I want. It may not be rational. I know some people think I am crazy.
- lobocinza 4y ago
  It makes sense but on practical terms it's expensive and uncovenient to buy MP3s.
  - georgeecollins 4y ago
    That is true. But if say Spotify costs $9.99 / month and you buy tracks for $0.99 or album $8.99 (average ~12 tracks, maybe $0.60). After three years you have a pretty big collection, like 600 songs. And it would just get bigger. I have sirius xm in my car, which is how I learn about new things. But you could hear new stuff via FM or YouTube. The truth is I don't spent $9.99 a month on average so maybe it is not that expensive.
    - lobocinza 4y ago
      Where can you buy an album at $8.99? Spotify, if I were a customer, would cost me ~$4 / month. Music streaming at current prices isn't profitable. It makes sense for the average dude to subscribe to Spotify.
      - troyvit 4y ago
        Lots of albums on bandcamp are in this price range[1]. Some are even "pay what you want." [1] Example: https://rubberoh.bandcamp.com https://rubberoh.bandcamp.com If what spotify is doing isn't profitable then it isn't sustainable, so why sink your time into it? When they go belly up what happens to all the time you invested in it?
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
An acquaintance of mine I lost contact with used to copy each DVD he rented from the video store, back in the early to mid 2000's. Then he realized he had a box full of DVD-Rs, nicely ripped using DVDFab Decrypter and processed and RCE-stripped with the latest DVD Shrink, but had never gone back into that box to rewatch any of them, and had never been asked by anyone if he had any of those movies. It was at that point where he decided if he really liked a movie, it was worth buying to have the original box and leaflet.
mechanical_bear 4y ago
Any ethical considerations aside for pirating: I agreed with you until the final sentence. There is no problem with choosing to keep a show after watching it, that’s their choice. Why would a data retention strategy that differs from yours be a “problem”?
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Only because of the cost, which is only a problem for the person doing it if they find it to be so personally, which the OP seems to, so. Or maybe I misinterpreted this post and they don't think it's a problem, which is fine then. But if the post is about how expensive it is to pirate... that expense has a lot to do with the data retention policy choice, not just the pirating. Is the point to be made.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
jrochkind1 4y ago
After all, if you want to watch it again -- you can always pirate it again! (The one complication is that I pirate using private BitTorrent tracker sites where I need to do some amount of seeding to stay on good terms, under conditions that vary from site to site, and can be hard to keep track of as I try to recover storage space). But yeah, I'd say the cost of OP is not in the pirating, it's in the hoarding.
- joshgachnang 4y ago
  You say that, but a lot of older shows become increasingly hard to get copies of the longer from the air date you get (legally or pirated)
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    I have not had that experience as a pirater of TV shows, I can have pretty much always been able to get anything I ever wanted that I ever could before, through the sources I use. But certainly there is no guarantee, that is true. (I don't use usenet as a source, myself).
    - joshgachnang 4y ago
      Yeah, it's probably a natural effect of using usenet with its built in retention. Definitely once you get past 10 years (typical retention is ~3000 days), things drop off a lot because no one re-uploads them.
eternityforest 4y ago
This is one of the very first tines I have seen data hoarding described as a problem rather than just a hobby. It does seem to have aspects that are a bit more troublesome than people talk about. Reddit seems very pro hoarding, this thread seems to see it like physical hoarding. It doesn't seem to be as much of a problem as this thread would make you think though.
- badRNG 4y ago
  Eh, sending $1200 on a hobby doesn't seem all that problematic to me, especially if one is getting additional utility from it. It's not like the cat is going to go missing behind a pile of hard drives any time soon.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  OP Doesn't need to go to rehab, but OP described a problem (expense is growing) and one solution would be to think about the collection in a different way. I think in this case, it is a 'problem' in a practical sense, not a moral one. That being said if OP just wants to vent and doesn't want a solution then there's that too.
alsetmusic 4y ago
> Your piracy is an excuse for data hoarding, which is a problem. Not OP, but I’m guilty of this. However, I also rewatch anything I like and love introducing people to things they haven’t seen. It’s great being able to share a large library of curated content.
cybrox 4y ago
Data hoarding is not a problem. Collecting and organizing something can bring great joy to people. Think of collectors. Most of my collection is older stuff, not available on streaming services anymore. Forgotten, almost, in a lot of places since companies can't be bothered to license it anymore. In an age where a lot of culturally relevant media is not stored on physical copies anymore, preserving what we love for our children is all the more important.
867-5309 4y ago
why would data hoarding be a problem? it can be a perfectly legitimate hobby, has massive communities and also acts as digital preservation, think the biggest hoarder on the planet archive.org I hear about people who stopped hoarding when they discovered the hybrid middleground: debrid services, which cache torrents and usenet so they can be directly downloaded / streamed. you pay roughly the same per month as you would for the basic Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney, etc. packages but on just one subscription, i.e. all the content for the price of one. the quality and reliability is better too (4K, 10bit, 7.1, atmos, CDN..)
nunez 4y ago
I am 100% against hoarding, but data hoarding makes a lot more sense to me. I was looking for an album by a small punk band called Straighten Things Out called "Dawn Of A New Hope". Loved this album; listened to it all of the time on Apple Music (where I discovered it). Went on a walk one day and tried to load it...and it was gone. I can't even find this album on eBay, and you can find everything there! "Milo Goes To College" by The Descendants, a more well-known pop punk band, was removed as well. Randomly, without warning. The Descendants are often credited as the "fathers" of Pop Punk; basically any mainstream pop punk band you've heard of cites them as an influence. This album basically started this genre...and it's gone. Fortunately there are enough vinyls of this record that make it easy to find when I one day build my epic vinyl collection. Had I saved these to my iTunes Library or ripped them to a NAS of some kind, I'd still have it. (Fun fact: Milo Goes To College _was_ in my Google Play Music Locker, which Google sunsetted when they launched YouTube Music, so I lost that "copy". I'm also going to guess that it was in my iTunes Music Library as well, which still exists as cloud storage, but albums that you add to your iCloud Music Library from Apple Music are pointers to tracks in the streaming service which can go away at any time.)
- exikyut 4y ago
  *Yells at Google for a good 15 minutes* ...I'm a tad surprised that worked as well as it did: 1. https://vk.com/wall-112927118?w=wall-112927118_185 https://vk.com/wall-112927118?w=wall-112927118_185 ("Download") 2. http://metalbootlegs08.blogspot.com/2016/10/descendents-milo-goes-to-college-1982.html http://metalbootlegs08.blogspot.com/2016/10/descendents-milo... ("Official Website") Oh, also - *hands you a vacuum cleaner that tends to eat things in case they disappear later* - maybe go wandering/exploring? These types of sites are incredibly fun yet even more transient.
  - nunez 4y ago
    You can still find some downloads on OLD blogspot aggregators but many of those links point to archives on Mediafire and Megaupload, both of which are no longer around. piratebay might still point to trackers that have copies, but bittorrent isn't as popular as it was in the past
compsciphd 4y ago
data hoarding is hoarding, but it might be a better way to get the dopamine hit one gets from hoarding in a way that doesn't take over and ruin one's life. imagine this same person was someone who in the past might have hoarded VHS recordings or newspapers. How much space would that take up. A significant amount, to the point where we see the houses of hoarders and the hoarding has really damaged their ability to live. While data hoarding does take time and money, it doesn't have to take over one's physical space in the same manner. So, while hoarding can be a problem, it really depends on the damage its doing to one's life. If one spends hours a day searching for content, neglecting one's life/family/job and putting them at risk, that's bad. If one has things automated, and its just a question of money they spend on it, then its just a question can they afford it. If they can, its just a hobby, not a sickness, as its not damaging to one's life. Now, even with what I said, it can be hard for the person themselves to understand the effect it might be having on their life, perhaps until its too late (you think you are on top of things, but things unravel quickly).
ben174 4y ago
You are exactly me. Right down to (Robocop). But I still haven't figured out how to hit that delete button. As much as I know I need to. I'm sitting on 30TB now of stuff I'll never ever ever watch again. But I just can't delete it.
- philistine 4y ago
  Don't delete it. Just disconnect the drives and shove them in a cupboard. Do it slowly. Move from everything is in my library all the time to I move movies to drives I keep disconnected.
brokenmachine 4y ago
>I only keep the movies I really love and want to rewatch (Robocop). I absolutely love that Robocop is the specific movie that you felt needed to be mentioned. :)
- philistine 4y ago
  IT'S THE PERFECT FILM!
winternett 4y ago
People used to keep racks of CD and DVDs years ago and it wasn't a syndrome at all... They're still great for when Internet goes down. With bandwidth becoming a metered utility and cost of streaming becoming a ridiculously overpriced fiasco, it's more important than ever to be able to be able to buy and own content. Even cloud storage is now yet another costly monthly service set to rise over time, and that's why device makers are reducing the storage capabilities on phones and computers while prices still rise. We need to fight this trend by spending more carefully on devices and services, they often add no new value when updated besides new revenue streams for the companies.

sophacles 4y ago

> Your piracy is an excuse for data hoarding, which is a problem. Your fake concern an excuse for busy-bodying, which is a problem.

moffkalast 4y ago
I mean, what's wrong with data hoarding? People always say you should have backups, but when you make some proper ones it's suddenly "hoarding" and "a problem" smh.
- dubswithus 4y ago
  Who is claiming that you must have backups of pirated content?
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    People. It's written right there.
dubswithus 4y ago
How is it that? OP is the one that shared. No one is forcing him to post here.
- sophacles 4y ago
  Did OP ask if it was a problem? Did OP state it was a problem? Not that I see - AFAICT the only people declaring it a problem are the busybodies latching on to OP spending the same amount on this hobby as they would dining out at a decent restaurant once a month.
  - Supermancho 4y ago
    > Did OP state it was a problem? The title ascribes it to "piracy" costs, which is incorrect. GL with whatever.
    - sophacles 4y ago
      The title is > Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content That doesn't say it's a problem. It's a statement of fact. You are projecting a problem onto it. I pay more for dinner out than I would if signed up for HelloFresh to be delivered to my house. What if I like eating out? What if neither cost has any meaningful impact on my bottom line? Is that a problem too?

hestefisk 4y ago

I’d buy that for a dollar!

l33t2328 4y ago

In what sense is data hoarding a problem? I’ve only ever heard the term used in jest, at least partially, and in particular not ever with the same severity that actual hoarding receives.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
colinmhayes 4y ago
Well it's costing this guy $45 a month apparently.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  $45 a month is a pretty cheap vice as far as things go, though. You could easily be spending $45 a month just on streaming services.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    Or he could spend $10 on the tracker, $10 to run a normal computer without 30 drives, and still watch all the same stuff for half the price.
    - pirate-Loo6uoDu 4y ago
      Maybe there are better usenet services that don't get holes punched in their collections as much, but generally on usenet you get missing episodes over time.
    - bluefirebrand 4y ago
      My interpretation of your original post was that you were saying spending $45 a month on this project illustrated that he has a problem. Is that accurate? How does the fact that he could be saving money support that?
      - 4y ago

300bps 4y ago

I rewatch things all the time. If I’m doing side work at night and just want something on the background I’ll put on a movie or show that I’ve seen before. Beyond that, hard drives are cheap! I have a single 18 TB disk in my main computer that runs Plex. It lets me and my kids watch content from anywhere with an Internet connection. 18 TB hard drives are about $300.

mitchdoogle 4y ago
A single terabyte can hold at least 500 hours of 1080p video. A few terabytes is plenty to keep a large library of rewatchable content AND download new stuff frequently (and delete it when you need room)
Feritiuuu 4y ago
After 4tb dlof data I started to get weirded out by running too big disks. Resilvering might take ages. So long that raid2 might be mandatory. I haven't calculated the right risk factor but I still only use 4tb disks
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  Eh I recently switched to two 14tb disks of different manufacturers. One is usually in standby and once a week I do a rsync to it. Btrfs on both for checksums. Good enough for me, I assume it's way more likely that a PSU failure fries them all, in which case no variant of raid would have helped anyways. For important stuff I have an off-site Backup, but that's only around 800gb anyways and growing a few gb per year.
- katbyte 4y ago
  A rebuild of a 160tb raid 6 array of 12 18tb disks for me takes around 3.3 days.
bityard 4y ago
> Beyond that, hard drives are cheap! I have a single 18 TB disk Fair warning: It is very dangerous to make statements like this in a public forum like this. You run the risk of someone spotting it and making a seemingly-innocent reply along the lines of, "Oh, you should at LEAST have TWO disks set up as a mirror so you don't lose all your movies when (not if, but when) the disk dies." And then someone else will say, "LOL u noob, RAID not a backup!" Another participant will assure you that no data is safe unless it's stored at on at least a 5-disk ZFS array. And then someone else will jump in to point out that even ZFS is not safe if you're not running ECC memory. And course you can't just have ONE of these ECC-enabled 5-disk ZFS-breathing monsters, because every component ASIDE from the disks is a single point of failure, so you'd better have TWO just to be safe. Which means you'll need a UPS because sudden power loses are _awesome_ if you like having your platters scribbled all over by a browned-out disk controller. And what exactly is your disaster recovery plan in the event of a fire or flood, gotta have some infra running in good health off-site in case something like that happens. And so on. Of course if you dig far enough into these admonitions and suggestions, the good news is that you won't have the time to watch any of those movies.

gkop 4y ago

The data is currency though, in the pirate economy.

kyawzazaw 4y ago
Only if you can transfer/exchange it, no?
- colpabar 4y ago
  Good pirates seed forever.
liotier 4y ago
Sharing content you enjoy feels good - piracy reinforce social bonds !

temp8964 4y ago

> data hoarding, which is a problem. Data hoarding is not a problem. It's a hobby. Everyone needs a hobby, most hobbies cost money. Traveling? Cost money. Woodworking? Cost money. Photography? Cost money. Biking? Cost money. Gaming? Cost money (+ way more time). Data hoarding is just a hobby like others. Plus data hoarding can have great value, if you choose to hoard good content.

philistine 4y ago
Any hobby can turn into a problem. I'm quick to judge the data hoarders, because I absolutely do not consider myself one, but it can absolutely be a benign hobby. That being said, a 45$ a month electricity bill directly related to the hard drives, that's a lot of dough for making a number go up.
- temp8964 4y ago
  Hard drives can be turned to sleep when they are not being accessed. If you do that, the electricity cost will be very low. There is a believe that this will damage the hard drives. I am not sure how valid it is.
- A7C3D5 4y ago
  This seems to suggests that data hoarders mainly derive their satisfaction from actually filling up a hard drive. For me, the satisfaction is from having instant access to organized libraries of music and video of generally far higher fidelity than you can stream with current technology. There are currently no streaming services that can stream UHD 4k movies at a quality that is close to even a normal 1080p blu ray never mind an actual UHD blu ray. I'm very into film and the difference in video and sound quality, which most people will not notice or care about, is pretty significant to me. An uncompressed BR rip is 30-100 GB so even a fairly curated library can quickly outgrow drive space that most people couldn't fathom a sane person using. I have probably filled at least 60TB of drives in the past year alone since my ISP has been ignoring data caps, and that is besides the large amount that IS deleted, as I do not archive anything that's been lossily compressed after being ripped unless a higher quality version does not publicly exist. I "hoard" TOSEC libraries for every conceivable console and consumer computer system from ~1970 up to the PS3, but don't archive PC games past the DOS era, because Steam exists as a better service than I can provide for myself, so I use that. There is no equivalent service for music or film or Amiga games.

Freeboots 4y ago

Same. I keep the previous episode of a show until i get the next, to remind me what shows im watching and where im up to, but typically dont hang onto anything. These days the cost of downloading something again is less than the cost of hanging onto it just in case i maybe want to rewatch (usually years later).

zinodaur 4y ago

Good thing you have all those "data hoarders" to leech off of when you wanna download something tho...

pyhtel 4y ago
He's using usenet, I highly doubt he's seeding the data he holds
omnimus 4y ago
Great that they are so obsessive. I think its fair if you seed enough and then get off and delete.
Mo3 4y ago
He's on usenet, not torrenting. No need to keep or seed anything. OP is hoarding and attributing negative consequences of his own decision to a concept itself.
- Cyph0n 4y ago
  And who do you think reuploads stuff after DMCA/NTD takedowns?
  - Mo3 4y ago
    Im aware some people are busy hoarding data and providing it back to the ecosystem in these cases, but I fail to understand why or how the cost of this personal decision is in any way related to the cost of piracy, or why someone with this hobby would feel the need to complain about it, or publicly associate these costs with piracy itself. That’s illogical. It’s like mirroring Wikipedia on S3 and then publicly stating or even complaining that using Wikipedia costs hundreds of dollars.
    - pirate-Loo6uoDu 4y ago
      My copy of wikipedia is less than 100GB at the moment.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

> really love and want to rewatch (Robocop) You mean Dredd 2012. "Are you ready?" "Yes." "You don't look ready." Absolutely the best performance of Olivia Thirlby, although of course Karl Urban was great, too.

philistine 4y ago
Bitches leave.

georgeecollins 4y ago

I don't pirate, I pay for content, but I like to own a digital copy of music content. So I buy MP3s rather than subscribe to a service. It's probably strange-- and maybe dumb-- but I feel like in the long run I never know what will happen to a service in terms of how it may change in price or quality. If I own a CD or an MP3, I know I have what I want. It may not be rational. I know some people think I am crazy.

lobocinza 4y ago
It makes sense but on practical terms it's expensive and uncovenient to buy MP3s.
- georgeecollins 4y ago
  That is true. But if say Spotify costs $9.99 / month and you buy tracks for $0.99 or album $8.99 (average ~12 tracks, maybe $0.60). After three years you have a pretty big collection, like 600 songs. And it would just get bigger. I have sirius xm in my car, which is how I learn about new things. But you could hear new stuff via FM or YouTube. The truth is I don't spent $9.99 a month on average so maybe it is not that expensive.
  - lobocinza 4y ago
    Where can you buy an album at $8.99? Spotify, if I were a customer, would cost me ~$4 / month. Music streaming at current prices isn't profitable. It makes sense for the average dude to subscribe to Spotify.
    - troyvit 4y ago
      Lots of albums on bandcamp are in this price range[1]. Some are even "pay what you want." [1] Example: https://rubberoh.bandcamp.com https://rubberoh.bandcamp.com If what spotify is doing isn't profitable then it isn't sustainable, so why sink your time into it? When they go belly up what happens to all the time you invested in it?

tenebrisalietum 4y ago

An acquaintance of mine I lost contact with used to copy each DVD he rented from the video store, back in the early to mid 2000's. Then he realized he had a box full of DVD-Rs, nicely ripped using DVDFab Decrypter and processed and RCE-stripped with the latest DVD Shrink, but had never gone back into that box to rewatch any of them, and had never been asked by anyone if he had any of those movies. It was at that point where he decided if he really liked a movie, it was worth buying to have the original box and leaflet.

mechanical_bear 4y ago

Any ethical considerations aside for pirating: I agreed with you until the final sentence. There is no problem with choosing to keep a show after watching it, that’s their choice. Why would a data retention strategy that differs from yours be a “problem”?

jrochkind1 4y ago
Only because of the cost, which is only a problem for the person doing it if they find it to be so personally, which the OP seems to, so. Or maybe I misinterpreted this post and they don't think it's a problem, which is fine then. But if the post is about how expensive it is to pirate... that expense has a lot to do with the data retention policy choice, not just the pirating. Is the point to be made.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

jrochkind1 4y ago

After all, if you want to watch it again -- you can always pirate it again! (The one complication is that I pirate using private BitTorrent tracker sites where I need to do some amount of seeding to stay on good terms, under conditions that vary from site to site, and can be hard to keep track of as I try to recover storage space). But yeah, I'd say the cost of OP is not in the pirating, it's in the hoarding.

joshgachnang 4y ago
You say that, but a lot of older shows become increasingly hard to get copies of the longer from the air date you get (legally or pirated)
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  I have not had that experience as a pirater of TV shows, I can have pretty much always been able to get anything I ever wanted that I ever could before, through the sources I use. But certainly there is no guarantee, that is true. (I don't use usenet as a source, myself).
  - joshgachnang 4y ago
    Yeah, it's probably a natural effect of using usenet with its built in retention. Definitely once you get past 10 years (typical retention is ~3000 days), things drop off a lot because no one re-uploads them.

eternityforest 4y ago

This is one of the very first tines I have seen data hoarding described as a problem rather than just a hobby. It does seem to have aspects that are a bit more troublesome than people talk about. Reddit seems very pro hoarding, this thread seems to see it like physical hoarding. It doesn't seem to be as much of a problem as this thread would make you think though.

badRNG 4y ago
Eh, sending $1200 on a hobby doesn't seem all that problematic to me, especially if one is getting additional utility from it. It's not like the cat is going to go missing behind a pile of hard drives any time soon.
mikkergp 4y ago
OP Doesn't need to go to rehab, but OP described a problem (expense is growing) and one solution would be to think about the collection in a different way. I think in this case, it is a 'problem' in a practical sense, not a moral one. That being said if OP just wants to vent and doesn't want a solution then there's that too.

alsetmusic 4y ago

> Your piracy is an excuse for data hoarding, which is a problem. Not OP, but I’m guilty of this. However, I also rewatch anything I like and love introducing people to things they haven’t seen. It’s great being able to share a large library of curated content.

cybrox 4y ago

Data hoarding is not a problem. Collecting and organizing something can bring great joy to people. Think of collectors. Most of my collection is older stuff, not available on streaming services anymore. Forgotten, almost, in a lot of places since companies can't be bothered to license it anymore. In an age where a lot of culturally relevant media is not stored on physical copies anymore, preserving what we love for our children is all the more important.

867-5309 4y ago

why would data hoarding be a problem? it can be a perfectly legitimate hobby, has massive communities and also acts as digital preservation, think the biggest hoarder on the planet archive.org I hear about people who stopped hoarding when they discovered the hybrid middleground: debrid services, which cache torrents and usenet so they can be directly downloaded / streamed. you pay roughly the same per month as you would for the basic Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney, etc. packages but on just one subscription, i.e. all the content for the price of one. the quality and reliability is better too (4K, 10bit, 7.1, atmos, CDN..)

nunez 4y ago

I am 100% against hoarding, but data hoarding makes a lot more sense to me. I was looking for an album by a small punk band called Straighten Things Out called "Dawn Of A New Hope". Loved this album; listened to it all of the time on Apple Music (where I discovered it). Went on a walk one day and tried to load it...and it was gone. I can't even find this album on eBay, and you can find everything there! "Milo Goes To College" by The Descendants, a more well-known pop punk band, was removed as well. Randomly, without warning. The Descendants are often credited as the "fathers" of Pop Punk; basically any mainstream pop punk band you've heard of cites them as an influence. This album basically started this genre...and it's gone. Fortunately there are enough vinyls of this record that make it easy to find when I one day build my epic vinyl collection. Had I saved these to my iTunes Library or ripped them to a NAS of some kind, I'd still have it. (Fun fact: Milo Goes To College _was_ in my Google Play Music Locker, which Google sunsetted when they launched YouTube Music, so I lost that "copy". I'm also going to guess that it was in my iTunes Music Library as well, which still exists as cloud storage, but albums that you add to your iCloud Music Library from Apple Music are pointers to tracks in the streaming service which can go away at any time.)

exikyut 4y ago
*Yells at Google for a good 15 minutes* ...I'm a tad surprised that worked as well as it did: 1. https://vk.com/wall-112927118?w=wall-112927118_185 https://vk.com/wall-112927118?w=wall-112927118_185 ("Download") 2. http://metalbootlegs08.blogspot.com/2016/10/descendents-milo-goes-to-college-1982.html http://metalbootlegs08.blogspot.com/2016/10/descendents-milo... ("Official Website") Oh, also - *hands you a vacuum cleaner that tends to eat things in case they disappear later* - maybe go wandering/exploring? These types of sites are incredibly fun yet even more transient.
- nunez 4y ago
  You can still find some downloads on OLD blogspot aggregators but many of those links point to archives on Mediafire and Megaupload, both of which are no longer around. piratebay might still point to trackers that have copies, but bittorrent isn't as popular as it was in the past

compsciphd 4y ago

data hoarding is hoarding, but it might be a better way to get the dopamine hit one gets from hoarding in a way that doesn't take over and ruin one's life. imagine this same person was someone who in the past might have hoarded VHS recordings or newspapers. How much space would that take up. A significant amount, to the point where we see the houses of hoarders and the hoarding has really damaged their ability to live. While data hoarding does take time and money, it doesn't have to take over one's physical space in the same manner. So, while hoarding can be a problem, it really depends on the damage its doing to one's life. If one spends hours a day searching for content, neglecting one's life/family/job and putting them at risk, that's bad. If one has things automated, and its just a question of money they spend on it, then its just a question can they afford it. If they can, its just a hobby, not a sickness, as its not damaging to one's life. Now, even with what I said, it can be hard for the person themselves to understand the effect it might be having on their life, perhaps until its too late (you think you are on top of things, but things unravel quickly).

ben174 4y ago

You are exactly me. Right down to (Robocop). But I still haven't figured out how to hit that delete button. As much as I know I need to. I'm sitting on 30TB now of stuff I'll never ever ever watch again. But I just can't delete it.

philistine 4y ago
Don't delete it. Just disconnect the drives and shove them in a cupboard. Do it slowly. Move from everything is in my library all the time to I move movies to drives I keep disconnected.

brokenmachine 4y ago

>I only keep the movies I really love and want to rewatch (Robocop). I absolutely love that Robocop is the specific movie that you felt needed to be mentioned. :)

philistine 4y ago
IT'S THE PERFECT FILM!

winternett 4y ago

People used to keep racks of CD and DVDs years ago and it wasn't a syndrome at all... They're still great for when Internet goes down. With bandwidth becoming a metered utility and cost of streaming becoming a ridiculously overpriced fiasco, it's more important than ever to be able to be able to buy and own content. Even cloud storage is now yet another costly monthly service set to rise over time, and that's why device makers are reducing the storage capabilities on phones and computers while prices still rise. We need to fight this trend by spending more carefully on devices and services, they often add no new value when updated besides new revenue streams for the companies.