5 ms·

Cool but ... this also sounds like hording behavior. The number of things I've saved over the years only to throw them away years later and realize that saving

Cool but ... this also sounds like hording behavior. The number of things I've saved over the years only to throw them away years later and realize that saving them in the first place was a waste of time. In the 90s my friend's mom would video tape AMC movies. She had 300+ tapes. Maybe she had a few rare ones but now all those movies are available on demand either legally or illegally and in much better quality. Another friend kept all of his 1980s computer magazines (Byte, etc...) and moved these extremely heavy boxes through 30+ years of moves. I doubt he ever opened a single magazine since the moment he saved them. Then they all appeared on The Archive and he finally got rid of them. To be clear, I have a few youtube videos saved on my local storage. I'm just thinking that saving every video I watch reminds me of the things I've personally over-saved. Actually that reminds me. I met up with the magazine saving friend recently which is when I verified that he finally got rid of his stash. It made me think about things I'm still saving that if I reflect on I know I will never actually look at. For example I have box of about eight 3.5 inch floppy disks from my Amiga days. The odds that I'm going to get an Amiga or download an Amiga emu and get a drive to read those are close enough to zero that I should throw them away. Similarly I have a book of CD-ROMs of backed up data from the 90s. There's a close to 0% chance that I'm never going to bother look at their contents.

fcpguru 1y ago
oh that's not why I want them local. I want to open them in final cut pro and edit them and use parts in other videos. I delete the data folder at the end of each day.
nemomarx 1y ago
Getting them on a public shared archive is probably a good outcome though. There was that lady who taped hundreds of hours of daytime TV and archiving that has some interesting historical uses? But a personal copy I'm not sure has much point yeah.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  > Marion Marguerite Stokes (née Butler; November 25, 1929 – December 14, 2012) was an American access television producer, businesswoman, investor, civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, and archivist, especially known for hoarding and archiving hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years [70,000 VHS tapes], from 1977 until her death in 2012, at which time she had been operating nine properties and three storage units. According to the Los Angeles Review of Books review of the 2019 documentary film Recorder, Stokes's massive project of recording the 24-hour news cycle "makes a compelling case for the significance of guerrilla archiving." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo https://recorderfilm.com/ https://recorderfilm.com/
mananaysiempre 1y ago
> Another friend kept all of his 1980s computer magazines (Byte, etc...) and moved these extremely heavy boxes through 30+ years of moves. I don’t think IA has all early issues of the Microsoft Systems Journal (later MSDN Magazine), among others. So this can be useful. (Also, what kind of person do you think put the magazines up on IA in the first place?..)
- asdefghyk 1y ago
  Lots magazines never made it to the archives and have been lost.
  - mananaysiempre 1y ago
    They are probably still in libraries somewhere (ironically, a worse-funded library is better as there’s less chance they’ve thrown them out to make space for newer stuff). The problem is locating them.
    - asdefghyk 1y ago
      I obtained a archive of bound EDN magazines from a engineering library in the mid 90s I thew in bin because of lack of storage. I have regretted thast for years as Internet archive only has a few issues. Another such technical magazine is Dr Dobbs. IA only ever has a few issues ....
bombcar 1y ago
Digital hoarding takes nearly no practical space. And there’s a number of YouTube videos o wish I could still access.
ThrowawayTestr 1y ago
Hard drives are cheap and compact. The real issue is archiving with no organization or indexing.
jh00ker 1y ago
> I have a book of CD-ROMs of backed up data >There's a close to 0% chance that I'm never going to bother look at their contents. More likely scenario, your children, grandchildren or other family members go through your shit after you pass away and discover stuff about you that perhaps you never wanted to share. This is something I think about a lot because I don't have a "digital legacy plan."
- npteljes 1y ago
  Store your archive encrypted, and then later you can decide if you share the password or not :)
- socalgal2 1y ago
  > More likely scenario, your children, grandchildren or other family members go through your shit after you pass away I think that's not really likely. I'm pretty sure if you poll you'll find that few children care about their parent's "stuff". You can find plenty of people who've lost parents who found that they didn't have any interest in going through their parents stuff and then from that realized their children would be the same to them. Most children aren't going to dig through anything more than a physical photo album, and when they do, the only pictures that are relevant to them are those with people they know. The rest only have meaning to the dead parent. They aren't going to dig through hard drives or CDs unless they are searching for financial documents so they can finish up their parent's financial affairs. > discover stuff about you that perhaps you never wanted to share I do worry about that. I just tell myself I'll be dead so it doesn't really matter.
  - Larrikin 1y ago
    Where are you making this conclusion from? Nobody in my family was waiting for one of my parents to die and it actually happened rather suddenly although he was retirement age. There was a very rapid effort to ensure we discovered as many passwords as possible, bought a family NAS, and backed up his entire computer starting with the Lightroom video and pictures. We later went through all of the family photos and folders he hadn't put in there. To this day it's constantly running with an off site back up to my NAS. There are some photos of cousins we didn't really know, but he owned the best digital cameras of every era since their invention so it's a huge documentation of life. It would have been a family tragedy to lose that.
hkon 1y ago
With enough space available hoarding is just thinking ahead.
SilverElfin 1y ago
I would like to be able to search old videos I’ve seen sometimes. Like to find that one recipe I saw or to pull out that one fact I thought I heard. Or sometimes just to listen to a song that later got made private or deleted outright. When YouTube deletes a video it doesn’t even leave the title in your playlist so it can be frustrating to try and find the same thing again.
- frou_dh 1y ago
  > When YouTube deletes a video it doesn’t even leave the title in your playlist I think this was an insidious decision of YouTube. It's like they want to pretend that videos deleted for ToS violations never existed, because by default the playlist does not even display the "holes" that it now has, either.
microtonal 1y ago
I am the exact opposite and sell or throw away pretty much everything that I don't use. I find that doing so not only clutters the house less, but also gives you less to worry about. My general rule is - if I didn't use it for a year, I don't need it. There are obviously some exceptions like a fire extinguisher (which I hope to never use) and digitized photos, which only go through a careful selection. I think the thing I kept the longest was a Libranet Linux 3.0 CD set because I worked for Libra Computer Systems for a while and this was the release that I helped building. A few years ago I threw it away, I think after I saw someone uploaded it to archive.org. When I'm 60 and want to install it again for good old time's sake I can. tl;de: if you don't use something for a year, you probably don't need it.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  I don't get around to using plenty of things for the first time a year after I've purchased them. That policy in my life would be a nightmare of constantly rebuying stuff, or failing to rebuy stuff that is now gone forever. Almost everything that has become indispensable in my life took years to integrate into my life to any significant degree. "Need" is a weasel word. You don't need anything.
  - redserk 1y ago
    I’d own a lot less stuff if there were more opportunities to rent infrequently used items. As it stands, I have a workshop and electronics bench with many tools that will go unused for years but are critical when I need them and too expensive to buy and throw away.
    - imtringued 1y ago
      There is also the problem that people who sell their used stuff on classifieds think of their article to be worth as much of the original purchase price as possible, but don't think about the fact that people would rather buy new stuff. In reality the mindset they should be having is that the buyer and the seller are doing a group buy separated in time, which means that both paying half the price of new is fair and should be expected.
graemep 1y ago
Physical media had a much higher cost in terms of both the cost of the media and the space it uses so you can horde a lot more. Maybe something a bit more selective than this though!
- lukebechtel 1y ago
  Yes! Hoarding is bad when it's costly, due to space, time, or money. Digital media hoarding is thus not bad at all!
  - socalgal2 1y ago
    You have to define "cost". I have a "server" with 3 external drives connected. One is "media" and 2 are for backups. I have a drawer with 11 external HD drives which I haven't used in years that used to be my "media" and backup drives. Each of those represent money (buying the drive) and time (copying stuff from old 1TB drives to 2TB drives to 4TB drives) etc.... So there is a cost to digital media hording. I wanted to save the videos I'd captured from my car's cameras but there's ~250gb every 3-4 months or so which is a more money needed. Plus, if I wanted them actually available to access I'd need a way to plug in more drives live into my server so more $$$$ and I'd need to back them up for when the drives fail so more $$$$. So yea, there is a cost to digital media hording.
    - mlyle 1y ago
      The storage is cheap. The cost is keeping it online and the opportunity cost of gathering, maintaining, and preserving collections.
    - graemep 1y ago
      There is a cost, but it is a much lower cost. There are degrees of hording too - saving all the video from your cars cameras permanently is pretty extreme. It would also be a lot more expensive and difficult if you were saving it to videotape.
toomuchtodo 1y ago
PSA: if you have a collection or other artifacts for ingest by IA, I’ll cover reasonable shipping costs to get them there. Above a certain size, they’ll handle logistics of packing and shipping for ingest. https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donation-to-the-internet-archive/ https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat... Tools to make this easy exist if you already have digital versions. https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive And don’t forget to send a few dollars if and when you can. https://archive.org/donate https://archive.org/donate (no affiliation, I just like the public good)
pessimizer 1y ago
> Then they all appeared on The Archive and he finally got rid of them. Sometimes you're the person who is uploading them to public archives. Because everybody else threw them all away, and you saved them until the technology made archiving practical enough. I've been replacing all of my physical media for years, but the reason I can do that now is because other people scan/rip and archive/share the stuff. You also have unique stuff that you may not even know is unique. When you find something in your house that you can't find online, scan it and you're paying everybody back for all of the scanning they did for you. With the CD-ROMs, you should just glide through them one by one and check if you can find the stuff online. If you can, throw them in the trash. If you can't, copy their contents to a folder, and throw them in the trash. Go through the folder over the next hour or next 20 years (however long it takes to get around to it) and take the things you can't find online that you think somebody might want, and get those things to that somebody (uploading to archive.org is always a good place to start.) edit: I know for a fact that for a lot of people, uploading somewhere on the internet is their standard pre-deletion ritual.
attila-lendvai 1y ago
hoarding, or maybe just anti-censorship measure.
latexr 1y ago
I agree with you on a personal level. I also collected a bunch of different things but eventually threw them all away and am now extremely selective about what I keep. I even avoid hoarding digital stuff. However, in your examples, the fact those things eventually became available in other forms is not necessarily a counterpoint to your acquaintances having kept them. The specific counterpoint being Marion Stokes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
IncreasePosts 1y ago
It's only hoarding if you don't fill the collection. It also depends on what percent of your storage you devote to it. If I could store every video I ever watched locally and only pay 1% of my storage cost, why not?
6510 1y ago
> saving them in the first place was a waste of time I think of it like this: Automatically save everything and spend time deleting the things I don't want to keep. vs Manually saving everything. "Don't want to keep" depends on disk space and cluttering up the list as it grows. Disk space is not really a thing. I use to have a friend who spend many hours every week cleaning up his 512 GB drive. He was quite obviously deleting things he wanted to keep but "had to" make choices. I just have enough drives to keep 1 to 3 copies of everything. (The single drive will also fail inevitably) The clutter still seems to happen even if I make the effort to get rid of things. Organizing it a bit, say at least by date is inevitable. Therefore there is nothing to be gained by wasting time saving things. It is more time efficient to waste time by deleting only enormous folders that you clearly don't need to keep around. Hoarding is only an appropriate term if you don't have the space for it. If you have an empty airplane hangar a few boxes of foo isn't hoarding.
Bender 1y ago
It is hoarding behavior. I am sometimes guilty of it but I have no regrets. I have DVD's and CD's that either do exist online in a modified and sometimes censored format or got cancelled for reasons that exist now but did not exist when the movie or song was created social constructs, cancel culture, etc... The original versions probably exist in some obscure place but I am happy with them existing in my collection as well for data parity purposes. The same thing occurs with online videos, podcasts, music and movies. I prefer to preserve the original artistic works of the producers, directors and screen writers. It could be I am alone in this endeavor and perhaps I am just a hoarder in that regard. I like to watch movies or listen to songs in the way the artists originally intended rather than the current ways that society has determined I should. The exception of course is when a movie is re-mastered and they improve lighting, sound, resolution, etc... I hesitate to even imagine how AI will sloppify these great works in the future or how they will re-imagine podcasts. The original art will be lost to time and many people will never experience the original results of the blood sweat and tears that went into making them.
xdfgh1112 1y ago
Hording behaviour doesn't really apply digitally. It's not like it's physical magazines or VHS. It's just bytes and bytes are incredibly cheap. It's also easier to move, delete or search. And even if you don't want it, you can upload it to the IA and maybe someone else will use it. Try doing that with your boxes of VHS.

fcpguru 1y ago

oh that's not why I want them local. I want to open them in final cut pro and edit them and use parts in other videos. I delete the data folder at the end of each day.

nemomarx 1y ago

Getting them on a public shared archive is probably a good outcome though. There was that lady who taped hundreds of hours of daytime TV and archiving that has some interesting historical uses? But a personal copy I'm not sure has much point yeah.

toomuchtodo 1y ago
> Marion Marguerite Stokes (née Butler; November 25, 1929 – December 14, 2012) was an American access television producer, businesswoman, investor, civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, and archivist, especially known for hoarding and archiving hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years [70,000 VHS tapes], from 1977 until her death in 2012, at which time she had been operating nine properties and three storage units. According to the Los Angeles Review of Books review of the 2019 documentary film Recorder, Stokes's massive project of recording the 24-hour news cycle "makes a compelling case for the significance of guerrilla archiving." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo https://recorderfilm.com/ https://recorderfilm.com/

mananaysiempre 1y ago

> Another friend kept all of his 1980s computer magazines (Byte, etc...) and moved these extremely heavy boxes through 30+ years of moves. I don’t think IA has all early issues of the Microsoft Systems Journal (later MSDN Magazine), among others. So this can be useful. (Also, what kind of person do you think put the magazines up on IA in the first place?..)

asdefghyk 1y ago
Lots magazines never made it to the archives and have been lost.
- mananaysiempre 1y ago
  They are probably still in libraries somewhere (ironically, a worse-funded library is better as there’s less chance they’ve thrown them out to make space for newer stuff). The problem is locating them.
  - asdefghyk 1y ago
    I obtained a archive of bound EDN magazines from a engineering library in the mid 90s I thew in bin because of lack of storage. I have regretted thast for years as Internet archive only has a few issues. Another such technical magazine is Dr Dobbs. IA only ever has a few issues ....

bombcar 1y ago

Digital hoarding takes nearly no practical space. And there’s a number of YouTube videos o wish I could still access.

ThrowawayTestr 1y ago

Hard drives are cheap and compact. The real issue is archiving with no organization or indexing.

jh00ker 1y ago

> I have a book of CD-ROMs of backed up data >There's a close to 0% chance that I'm never going to bother look at their contents. More likely scenario, your children, grandchildren or other family members go through your shit after you pass away and discover stuff about you that perhaps you never wanted to share. This is something I think about a lot because I don't have a "digital legacy plan."

npteljes 1y ago
Store your archive encrypted, and then later you can decide if you share the password or not :)
socalgal2 1y ago
> More likely scenario, your children, grandchildren or other family members go through your shit after you pass away I think that's not really likely. I'm pretty sure if you poll you'll find that few children care about their parent's "stuff". You can find plenty of people who've lost parents who found that they didn't have any interest in going through their parents stuff and then from that realized their children would be the same to them. Most children aren't going to dig through anything more than a physical photo album, and when they do, the only pictures that are relevant to them are those with people they know. The rest only have meaning to the dead parent. They aren't going to dig through hard drives or CDs unless they are searching for financial documents so they can finish up their parent's financial affairs. > discover stuff about you that perhaps you never wanted to share I do worry about that. I just tell myself I'll be dead so it doesn't really matter.
- Larrikin 1y ago
  Where are you making this conclusion from? Nobody in my family was waiting for one of my parents to die and it actually happened rather suddenly although he was retirement age. There was a very rapid effort to ensure we discovered as many passwords as possible, bought a family NAS, and backed up his entire computer starting with the Lightroom video and pictures. We later went through all of the family photos and folders he hadn't put in there. To this day it's constantly running with an off site back up to my NAS. There are some photos of cousins we didn't really know, but he owned the best digital cameras of every era since their invention so it's a huge documentation of life. It would have been a family tragedy to lose that.

hkon 1y ago

With enough space available hoarding is just thinking ahead.

SilverElfin 1y ago

I would like to be able to search old videos I’ve seen sometimes. Like to find that one recipe I saw or to pull out that one fact I thought I heard. Or sometimes just to listen to a song that later got made private or deleted outright. When YouTube deletes a video it doesn’t even leave the title in your playlist so it can be frustrating to try and find the same thing again.

frou_dh 1y ago
> When YouTube deletes a video it doesn’t even leave the title in your playlist I think this was an insidious decision of YouTube. It's like they want to pretend that videos deleted for ToS violations never existed, because by default the playlist does not even display the "holes" that it now has, either.

microtonal 1y ago

I am the exact opposite and sell or throw away pretty much everything that I don't use. I find that doing so not only clutters the house less, but also gives you less to worry about. My general rule is - if I didn't use it for a year, I don't need it. There are obviously some exceptions like a fire extinguisher (which I hope to never use) and digitized photos, which only go through a careful selection. I think the thing I kept the longest was a Libranet Linux 3.0 CD set because I worked for Libra Computer Systems for a while and this was the release that I helped building. A few years ago I threw it away, I think after I saw someone uploaded it to archive.org. When I'm 60 and want to install it again for good old time's sake I can. tl;de: if you don't use something for a year, you probably don't need it.

pessimizer 1y ago
I don't get around to using plenty of things for the first time a year after I've purchased them. That policy in my life would be a nightmare of constantly rebuying stuff, or failing to rebuy stuff that is now gone forever. Almost everything that has become indispensable in my life took years to integrate into my life to any significant degree. "Need" is a weasel word. You don't need anything.
- redserk 1y ago
  I’d own a lot less stuff if there were more opportunities to rent infrequently used items. As it stands, I have a workshop and electronics bench with many tools that will go unused for years but are critical when I need them and too expensive to buy and throw away.
  - imtringued 1y ago
    There is also the problem that people who sell their used stuff on classifieds think of their article to be worth as much of the original purchase price as possible, but don't think about the fact that people would rather buy new stuff. In reality the mindset they should be having is that the buyer and the seller are doing a group buy separated in time, which means that both paying half the price of new is fair and should be expected.

graemep 1y ago

Physical media had a much higher cost in terms of both the cost of the media and the space it uses so you can horde a lot more. Maybe something a bit more selective than this though!

lukebechtel 1y ago
Yes! Hoarding is bad when it's costly, due to space, time, or money. Digital media hoarding is thus not bad at all!
- socalgal2 1y ago
  You have to define "cost". I have a "server" with 3 external drives connected. One is "media" and 2 are for backups. I have a drawer with 11 external HD drives which I haven't used in years that used to be my "media" and backup drives. Each of those represent money (buying the drive) and time (copying stuff from old 1TB drives to 2TB drives to 4TB drives) etc.... So there is a cost to digital media hording. I wanted to save the videos I'd captured from my car's cameras but there's ~250gb every 3-4 months or so which is a more money needed. Plus, if I wanted them actually available to access I'd need a way to plug in more drives live into my server so more $$$$ and I'd need to back them up for when the drives fail so more $$$$. So yea, there is a cost to digital media hording.
  - mlyle 1y ago
    The storage is cheap. The cost is keeping it online and the opportunity cost of gathering, maintaining, and preserving collections.
  - graemep 1y ago
    There is a cost, but it is a much lower cost. There are degrees of hording too - saving all the video from your cars cameras permanently is pretty extreme. It would also be a lot more expensive and difficult if you were saving it to videotape.

toomuchtodo 1y ago

PSA: if you have a collection or other artifacts for ingest by IA, I’ll cover reasonable shipping costs to get them there. Above a certain size, they’ll handle logistics of packing and shipping for ingest. https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donation-to-the-internet-archive/ https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat... Tools to make this easy exist if you already have digital versions. https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive And don’t forget to send a few dollars if and when you can. https://archive.org/donate https://archive.org/donate (no affiliation, I just like the public good)

pessimizer 1y ago

> Then they all appeared on The Archive and he finally got rid of them. Sometimes you're the person who is uploading them to public archives. Because everybody else threw them all away, and you saved them until the technology made archiving practical enough. I've been replacing all of my physical media for years, but the reason I can do that now is because other people scan/rip and archive/share the stuff. You also have unique stuff that you may not even know is unique. When you find something in your house that you can't find online, scan it and you're paying everybody back for all of the scanning they did for you. With the CD-ROMs, you should just glide through them one by one and check if you can find the stuff online. If you can, throw them in the trash. If you can't, copy their contents to a folder, and throw them in the trash. Go through the folder over the next hour or next 20 years (however long it takes to get around to it) and take the things you can't find online that you think somebody might want, and get those things to that somebody (uploading to archive.org is always a good place to start.) edit: I know for a fact that for a lot of people, uploading somewhere on the internet is their standard pre-deletion ritual.

attila-lendvai 1y ago

hoarding, or maybe just anti-censorship measure.

latexr 1y ago

I agree with you on a personal level. I also collected a bunch of different things but eventually threw them all away and am now extremely selective about what I keep. I even avoid hoarding digital stuff. However, in your examples, the fact those things eventually became available in other forms is not necessarily a counterpoint to your acquaintances having kept them. The specific counterpoint being Marion Stokes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes

IncreasePosts 1y ago

It's only hoarding if you don't fill the collection. It also depends on what percent of your storage you devote to it. If I could store every video I ever watched locally and only pay 1% of my storage cost, why not?

6510 1y ago

> saving them in the first place was a waste of time I think of it like this: Automatically save everything and spend time deleting the things I don't want to keep. vs Manually saving everything. "Don't want to keep" depends on disk space and cluttering up the list as it grows. Disk space is not really a thing. I use to have a friend who spend many hours every week cleaning up his 512 GB drive. He was quite obviously deleting things he wanted to keep but "had to" make choices. I just have enough drives to keep 1 to 3 copies of everything. (The single drive will also fail inevitably) The clutter still seems to happen even if I make the effort to get rid of things. Organizing it a bit, say at least by date is inevitable. Therefore there is nothing to be gained by wasting time saving things. It is more time efficient to waste time by deleting only enormous folders that you clearly don't need to keep around. Hoarding is only an appropriate term if you don't have the space for it. If you have an empty airplane hangar a few boxes of foo isn't hoarding.

Bender 1y ago

It is hoarding behavior. I am sometimes guilty of it but I have no regrets. I have DVD's and CD's that either do exist online in a modified and sometimes censored format or got cancelled for reasons that exist now but did not exist when the movie or song was created social constructs, cancel culture, etc... The original versions probably exist in some obscure place but I am happy with them existing in my collection as well for data parity purposes. The same thing occurs with online videos, podcasts, music and movies. I prefer to preserve the original artistic works of the producers, directors and screen writers. It could be I am alone in this endeavor and perhaps I am just a hoarder in that regard. I like to watch movies or listen to songs in the way the artists originally intended rather than the current ways that society has determined I should. The exception of course is when a movie is re-mastered and they improve lighting, sound, resolution, etc... I hesitate to even imagine how AI will sloppify these great works in the future or how they will re-imagine podcasts. The original art will be lost to time and many people will never experience the original results of the blood sweat and tears that went into making them.

xdfgh1112 1y ago

Hording behaviour doesn't really apply digitally. It's not like it's physical magazines or VHS. It's just bytes and bytes are incredibly cheap. It's also easier to move, delete or search. And even if you don't want it, you can upload it to the IA and maybe someone else will use it. Try doing that with your boxes of VHS.