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But, really, I wish I had only downloaded the things that I really love. Don't be like how young-me was. I downloaded everything I was even remotely interested

But, really, I wish I had only downloaded the things that I really love. Don't be like how young-me was. I downloaded everything I was even remotely interested in. Now I have too much, and apprehend the process of weeding out what I don't love. The issue is not space. The issue is the hoarding itself, and the messiness that is inherent in that.

blowski 3y ago
On the other hand, stumbling through some of that old crap can be wonderful. It’s like reading old diaries.
- tamimio 3y ago
  Can’t agree more! The other day I found an old hdd I had since 2006, and the amount of stuff in there left me with mixed feelings, happy, sad, nostalgic, all at once going through all those memories.. I did back it up but most likely won’t open soon from how I felt. I remember I also had an external hdd, the first external one I ever had back in 2003, where I had all my files in there, sad part is, it died I think around 2009, and young me wasn’t techie enough to recover the data, so it’s all gone.
thenoblesunfish 3y ago
An excellent point - if you have a well-curated set of things in your library, that's a great way to rediscover your favorites, or make recommendations to friends.
ghusto 3y ago
I downloaded everything and am glad I did. Every so often I dig through it and re-discover things I'd forgotten about. It's like physical hoarding: If everything's organised, it's a delight in years to come, but if it's in a big box-o-crap, then it's the same as not having it at all (worse, I guess, since it takes up space).
- feitingen 3y ago
  I completely agree. Cost of digital storage has just completely plummeted, and keeping stuff organized, even remotely, really makes for enjoyable rediscovery. Even the mediocre stuff is nice to go through if it's sorted. Old photos, videos and other original content is the best stuff to save for when you're older.
pharmakom 3y ago
Drop a few hundred dollars on storage (blu rays?) Move it all over Never think about it again
- tasuki 3y ago
  If the plan is to "never think about it again", why not just delete it?
- arccy 3y ago
  like they said, space is not the issue. it's only surfacing the things that matter. what good is a pile of mediocrity where you can't find the gems inside?
- chii 3y ago
  and then in the future, never be able to find anything from that stash of storage disks. What's needed is a wayback-machine-esque archiving method, where you can just find old stuff, but locally and self-hosted! Unfortunately, it does take a bit of effort to setup and not at all easy/painfree to keep running. So i guess my box of burnable dvds will forever be relegated to be just a display item.
  - prpl 3y ago
    I guess nobody has modded a 100 CD changers into a blu ray yet
- logifail 3y ago
  > Drop a few hundred dollars on storage (blu rays?) I'm saving up for a new tape drive (will probably be LTO 8) ... I have some fairly serious data hoarding issues.
- dspillett 3y ago
  In my experience recorded CDs/DVDs, which I'm assuming extends to writable blueray too, there is often some degradation over time, so you need to check on things occasionally and transfer to new media as needed. So “never think about it again” doesn't really work, unless you are truly just hoarding and will never read the stuff back! Though I've not used recordable CDs/DVDs for much for years, just occasionally when posting digital photos/videos up to a low-tech type who has limited slow Internet. These days online drives are large enough that I can keep everything I care to have to hand on a local RAID array for easy access, backed up remotely of course, and Internet access is quick and reliable so things that are less important or rare can be streamed or otherwise re-obtained easily. Maybe quality has improved over time?
Springtime 3y ago
I read this quite a bit on the r/DataHoarder subreddit, where users obtain vast amounts of all-in-one content (such as archival projects, piracy, etc) and the data isn't sufficiently organized/cataloged and it becomes too overwhelming to where they feel freed without it. (Granted the subreddit is named Data Hoarder and the focus is often grabbing volumes of data before it disappears). What helps for sure is like you mentioned in taking things at a more curated pace, where one can organize individual pieces of content at the time it's encountered (eg: saving a web page locally you want to refer/link back to in the future, or buying some music when one likes it and properly/consistently tagging it). I have tens of thousands of web pages saved for example and it's a wonderful resource as search engines have become poorer for many results and sites/pages disappear. Due to the habits formed over time with filenaming/organization it's also super quick to find resources locally.
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  > r/DataHoarder Modern day hoarders. If it wasn't for the Internet and hard drives, they'd fill their own space with stuff. :)
Symbiote 3y ago
During Covid WFH, I wrote a tiny script that marked all the music albums on my computer as 'unlistened', and then offered me a list of 10 from which I could choose one to listen to. I got through everything, deleted about a quarter, and even took about 10% of my CDs to the recycling/exchange place. This would be much less practical with video.
tenebrisalietum 3y ago
AI-based tools are the future here - local AI tools.
dusted 3y ago
I also saved _everything_ever_ from the first files my kid fingers typed out on a C64 keyboard and put to tape, those tapes are still there, as .wav files in my archives.. Why wav? Because they contain not only my first love-letters that I never got a printer (nor courage) to print out, but also snippets of the music that my dad had taped onto there off of the radio in the 80s, stuck there, between my data recordings.. As someone with almost no working memory and fairly bad long-term memory, I'm so happy to have this sea of digital (and analog) detritus to sift through, to help me remember who I was and what I saw. Everything I ever downloaded, inside "Desktop/Desktop/desktop/backups/oldpc/desktop/downloads/desktop/" awaits layers of my life, ready to be explored anew. Everything from the silly gifs I got on MSN messenger, to .pif files pointin into the void to remind me of that game I once played so often it earned a spot on my desktop. Terabyte after terabyte of who I was and what I did, it is my most important treasure, and I enjoy strolling through it in it's pure, raw form.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  I accidentally wiped a few years of files like that once. Now there's a gap there and it makes me a bit sad. I definitely go back and sift through some of the old stuff from time to time. It's pretty great.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    Yes, I think I accidentally threw the only drive (whoops) that had a lot of my childhood stuff away, in a binge of cleaning. I have recently realized there may be a couple legacy drives that might not have been wiped that might have it. I don't have much hope overall but I've been meaning to dig them out and check. this type of thing is one of the undersung benefits vs a sea of ad-hoc hard drives. yes, a central server/NAS (even just 2 disks) is expensive but it's also a central point you can rely on and centralize your backups. you can't let it become a pile either way, of course. but it's much much easier to work on manual dedup with everything on a single big zfs volume so you can compare directories and try to fold everything in sensibly. and snapshots let you roll this back if desired, or clone and copy files back out of history. I seem to recall there was an algorithm called "downward flooding" or similar that was designed to help identify this directory-tree similarity problem. But I can't quite locate it.
bArray 3y ago
I think hoarding is not so bad, as long as there is also the ability to tag and index the content. When it becomes unsearchable, you have a problem - because whether it's good or bad, you can't find it anyway. I think the issue is space though, otherwise we would simply archive everything and deal with the problem of search. For example, if you had every podcast audio file, you could search them using AI with something like "male and female talk about hacking floppy disks" and leave that to compute a while.
joshspankit 3y ago
A few years ago I realized we passed a threshold and that voice recordings had been “handled” (meaning you could conceivably use compression to record audio 24/7 and store it without too much cost since 1 year was about 1TB and multi-TB drives had dropped in price). Then that fact sat in the back of my head for a bit and I wrote it off since “yes you could record it all, but then what? It takes so much time to filter and edit that you’d have to make the choice between filtering and actually living”. But now, we’ve reached the edge of a different threshold: AI will be able to do the filtering and sorting. I suspect that this means those who stored everything they were even remotely interested in will have an advantage. They will be able to have AI reveal the gems that others will have lost completely.

blowski 3y ago

On the other hand, stumbling through some of that old crap can be wonderful. It’s like reading old diaries.

tamimio 3y ago
Can’t agree more! The other day I found an old hdd I had since 2006, and the amount of stuff in there left me with mixed feelings, happy, sad, nostalgic, all at once going through all those memories.. I did back it up but most likely won’t open soon from how I felt. I remember I also had an external hdd, the first external one I ever had back in 2003, where I had all my files in there, sad part is, it died I think around 2009, and young me wasn’t techie enough to recover the data, so it’s all gone.

thenoblesunfish 3y ago

An excellent point - if you have a well-curated set of things in your library, that's a great way to rediscover your favorites, or make recommendations to friends.

ghusto 3y ago

I downloaded everything and am glad I did. Every so often I dig through it and re-discover things I'd forgotten about. It's like physical hoarding: If everything's organised, it's a delight in years to come, but if it's in a big box-o-crap, then it's the same as not having it at all (worse, I guess, since it takes up space).

feitingen 3y ago
I completely agree. Cost of digital storage has just completely plummeted, and keeping stuff organized, even remotely, really makes for enjoyable rediscovery. Even the mediocre stuff is nice to go through if it's sorted. Old photos, videos and other original content is the best stuff to save for when you're older.

pharmakom 3y ago

Drop a few hundred dollars on storage (blu rays?) Move it all over Never think about it again

tasuki 3y ago
If the plan is to "never think about it again", why not just delete it?
arccy 3y ago
like they said, space is not the issue. it's only surfacing the things that matter. what good is a pile of mediocrity where you can't find the gems inside?
chii 3y ago
and then in the future, never be able to find anything from that stash of storage disks. What's needed is a wayback-machine-esque archiving method, where you can just find old stuff, but locally and self-hosted! Unfortunately, it does take a bit of effort to setup and not at all easy/painfree to keep running. So i guess my box of burnable dvds will forever be relegated to be just a display item.
- prpl 3y ago
  I guess nobody has modded a 100 CD changers into a blu ray yet
logifail 3y ago
> Drop a few hundred dollars on storage (blu rays?) I'm saving up for a new tape drive (will probably be LTO 8) ... I have some fairly serious data hoarding issues.
dspillett 3y ago
In my experience recorded CDs/DVDs, which I'm assuming extends to writable blueray too, there is often some degradation over time, so you need to check on things occasionally and transfer to new media as needed. So “never think about it again” doesn't really work, unless you are truly just hoarding and will never read the stuff back! Though I've not used recordable CDs/DVDs for much for years, just occasionally when posting digital photos/videos up to a low-tech type who has limited slow Internet. These days online drives are large enough that I can keep everything I care to have to hand on a local RAID array for easy access, backed up remotely of course, and Internet access is quick and reliable so things that are less important or rare can be streamed or otherwise re-obtained easily. Maybe quality has improved over time?

Springtime 3y ago

I read this quite a bit on the r/DataHoarder subreddit, where users obtain vast amounts of all-in-one content (such as archival projects, piracy, etc) and the data isn't sufficiently organized/cataloged and it becomes too overwhelming to where they feel freed without it. (Granted the subreddit is named Data Hoarder and the focus is often grabbing volumes of data before it disappears). What helps for sure is like you mentioned in taking things at a more curated pace, where one can organize individual pieces of content at the time it's encountered (eg: saving a web page locally you want to refer/link back to in the future, or buying some music when one likes it and properly/consistently tagging it). I have tens of thousands of web pages saved for example and it's a wonderful resource as search engines have become poorer for many results and sites/pages disappear. Due to the habits formed over time with filenaming/organization it's also super quick to find resources locally.

deafpolygon 3y ago
> r/DataHoarder Modern day hoarders. If it wasn't for the Internet and hard drives, they'd fill their own space with stuff. :)

Symbiote 3y ago

During Covid WFH, I wrote a tiny script that marked all the music albums on my computer as 'unlistened', and then offered me a list of 10 from which I could choose one to listen to. I got through everything, deleted about a quarter, and even took about 10% of my CDs to the recycling/exchange place. This would be much less practical with video.

tenebrisalietum 3y ago

AI-based tools are the future here - local AI tools.

dusted 3y ago

I also saved _everything_ever_ from the first files my kid fingers typed out on a C64 keyboard and put to tape, those tapes are still there, as .wav files in my archives.. Why wav? Because they contain not only my first love-letters that I never got a printer (nor courage) to print out, but also snippets of the music that my dad had taped onto there off of the radio in the 80s, stuck there, between my data recordings.. As someone with almost no working memory and fairly bad long-term memory, I'm so happy to have this sea of digital (and analog) detritus to sift through, to help me remember who I was and what I saw. Everything I ever downloaded, inside "Desktop/Desktop/desktop/backups/oldpc/desktop/downloads/desktop/" awaits layers of my life, ready to be explored anew. Everything from the silly gifs I got on MSN messenger, to .pif files pointin into the void to remind me of that game I once played so often it earned a spot on my desktop. Terabyte after terabyte of who I was and what I did, it is my most important treasure, and I enjoy strolling through it in it's pure, raw form.

Aerroon 3y ago
I accidentally wiped a few years of files like that once. Now there's a gap there and it makes me a bit sad. I definitely go back and sift through some of the old stuff from time to time. It's pretty great.
- paulmd 3y ago
  Yes, I think I accidentally threw the only drive (whoops) that had a lot of my childhood stuff away, in a binge of cleaning. I have recently realized there may be a couple legacy drives that might not have been wiped that might have it. I don't have much hope overall but I've been meaning to dig them out and check. this type of thing is one of the undersung benefits vs a sea of ad-hoc hard drives. yes, a central server/NAS (even just 2 disks) is expensive but it's also a central point you can rely on and centralize your backups. you can't let it become a pile either way, of course. but it's much much easier to work on manual dedup with everything on a single big zfs volume so you can compare directories and try to fold everything in sensibly. and snapshots let you roll this back if desired, or clone and copy files back out of history. I seem to recall there was an algorithm called "downward flooding" or similar that was designed to help identify this directory-tree similarity problem. But I can't quite locate it.

bArray 3y ago

I think hoarding is not so bad, as long as there is also the ability to tag and index the content. When it becomes unsearchable, you have a problem - because whether it's good or bad, you can't find it anyway. I think the issue is space though, otherwise we would simply archive everything and deal with the problem of search. For example, if you had every podcast audio file, you could search them using AI with something like "male and female talk about hacking floppy disks" and leave that to compute a while.

joshspankit 3y ago

A few years ago I realized we passed a threshold and that voice recordings had been “handled” (meaning you could conceivably use compression to record audio 24/7 and store it without too much cost since 1 year was about 1TB and multi-TB drives had dropped in price). Then that fact sat in the back of my head for a bit and I wrote it off since “yes you could record it all, but then what? It takes so much time to filter and edit that you’d have to make the choice between filtering and actually living”. But now, we’ve reached the edge of a different threshold: AI will be able to do the filtering and sorting. I suspect that this means those who stored everything they were even remotely interested in will have an advantage. They will be able to have AI reveal the gems that others will have lost completely.