Are you A Digital Hoarder?

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I think there is a bit of digital hoarder in all of us. Don't you?

Was I becoming a ones-and-zeros, bits-and-bytes version of my mother? Panicked, I reached out to hoarding experts, who often refer to any kind of obsessive digital collecting as “infomania.” Infomania, they say, is more subtly crippling than physical hoarding. With access to the web’s infinite amount of information and limitless supply of storage, digital hoarders are less inclined to think they have a problem.
 
Just buy a few 4TB HDDs and it's not a big deal. I have like 500GB of HD porn and a couple of TB of blu ray rips. I don't really consider it the same thing as real life hording. I just never know what I'll be in the mood to watch.
 
Does unplayed games in Steam count? Then yes big time hoarder. I really should just delete some stuff or buy some more 4tb drives.
 
Healthy collecting only becomes unhealthy hoarding when it significantly interferes with your health and general quality of life. Buying an extra 5TB harddrive for $120 every few years doesn't really effect anything, the way that hoarders of physical goods get trapped in their houses with roaches and filth and what not.

Also, hoarders tend to be disorganized, whereas digital collectors tend to have everything pretty well sorted.
 
Does it become meta-hoarding when you hoard drives full of data you've hoarded? :p
 
Absolutely. As a result, I really need to upgrade my storage. I do keep it organized at least (although, I'm sure the people on the show hoarders tell their loved ones the same thing lol)
 
my wife is... go on vacation take 20GB worth of photos because it's easy, and she totally won't go through the pictures and remove the 19GB worth of crappy photos that didn't come out, were blurry, the same as something else... worst of all she throws them on the SSD drive on the computer, pisses me off when I see I have 2GB remaining... WTF!?
 
I horde data as an excuse to play with bigger and better toys. At least, that was my initial excuse. Now I find it to be rather convenient to sit on the couch and hit a button on the remote instead of getting up and swapping out discs for the next episode of whatever TV show I'm (re)watching. Several TB and growing, all legal. I tried to get my wife into it, but she likes more recent TV, so it's Netflix for her. That'll probably change once I finish ripping all her period dramas and musicals.

That's not to say I don't want the toys anymore. My bigger/better toy reasoning has just changed to "Oh, it's for work/certifications/training".
 
Yes, and thankfully for us, the cost of storage on PC have been going down.

There was a time I horde digital stuff on DVD R
 
My many years of being stuck on dial-up when most people got broadband have shaped me into a digital hoarder. I would make sure to save everything because re-downloading it would waste bandwidth that could be used to download something else. I would only delete things if I'm absolutely sure I don't want it and/or it is something that I can very easily obtain again.

I still do that today on my slow 3Mb "broadband" connection.
 
Pretty much everything I really care about are document files for stuff that I've written, some pictures of my cute little kitty cat, and there's like a little over 2GB of MP3s that I like to listen to. It all fits on a 16GB super tiny thumb drive that I bought when my 4GB one started to get over like 3/4ths full. I think the only thing I do that's really kinda paranoid is to make copies of that stuff on all my computers all of the time which is like 3 laptops, the thumb drive, and a compact flash memory card. Keeping files up to date between all those places is really disorganized for me, but whatever.
 
I hoard high quality 1080P bluray rips... All my fave movies in perfect quality -- only takes up a single 4TB drive for now

Then there's my ISO drive, my personal files and music -- I think I'm pushing about 10TB of data... which really isn't that much. Storage is so cheap and small I can easily fit it in a normal computer for a few hundred dollars.
It's only going to get cheaper/easier.
 
I was, i used to have Terrabyte of stuff i got,then i said screw it, if i havent watched it, looked at it, played it in 3 months - Delete.

And now i do this regularly. i have 2 x 1TB in my laptop is all I used now, i am getting rid of my 3TB drive after 1 of 2 died.
 
Healthy collecting only becomes unhealthy hoarding when it significantly interferes with your health and general quality of life. Buying an extra 5TB harddrive for $120 every few years doesn't really effect anything, the way that hoarders of physical goods get trapped in their houses with roaches and filth and what not.

Also, hoarders tend to be disorganized, whereas digital collectors tend to have everything pretty well sorted.


As long as I don't have stacks of disks all over the house, blocking hallways it's not really the same :)

Years ago instead of buying another file cabinet, I started scanning everything. There's only a small amount of stuff (maybe 1-2%) where I figured it was important to hold onto the original. Everything else, even if there is only a slight chance I might need it gets scanned. A couple GB on my drive takes a lot less space than a couple 4 drawer file cabinets.


I also just upgraded my DVR to a 4TB drive for recorded TV shows, plus it has a pair of 2TB drives for rips and home movies/pictures. Much easier to upgrade the drive than listen to everyone arguing about what's too important to delete to make room for newer shows.
 
Healthy collecting only becomes unhealthy hoarding when it significantly interferes with your health and general quality of life. Buying an extra 5TB harddrive for $120 every few years doesn't really effect anything, the way that hoarders of physical goods get trapped in their houses with roaches and filth and what not.

Also, hoarders tend to be disorganized, whereas digital collectors tend to have everything pretty well sorted.
Amateur. If you're a REAL hoarder you get TWO drives to back up the files on the other one!
 
I was, i used to have Terrabyte of stuff i got,then i said screw it, if i havent watched it, looked at it, played it in 3 months - Delete.

And now i do this regularly. i have 2 x 1TB in my laptop is all I used now, i am getting rid of my 3TB drive after 1 of 2 died.

Yes, a drive dying on you is usually the wake-up call, or light-bulb that makes the distinction in a person's mind to either start to organize in a better fashion of what they could be ok with losing, or jump deeper into the never-ending hole of "I need $600 4-bay NAS to fit my 800-4000GB worth of HD porn....and some family pics and vids.
LOL.

Steam is something that does help with the gaming aspect of it, as we can now just leave it on our account, keep the save files, and delete the game.
 
I think the point was that digital hoarding isn't an issue because of space constraints, as is the case in hoarding of material goods, but rather the amount of time someone spends organizing their digital horde.

If you spend excessive amounts of time (subjective verbiage, I know) organizing digital files then yes, it is a debilitating condition.
 
It's about quality not quantity. Predictably there's an inverse relationship between the amount of data people gather, and their reading/assimilation of it.

The good part about the internet is, it's given rise to an entire generation of people who are convinced that if something can't be Googled, it's either untrue, doesn't exist or isn't worth reading about. It gives the relative few who visit libraries and crack books once in a while a vast advantage over 90+% of the population.
 
Yes, a drive dying on you is usually the wake-up call, or light-bulb that makes the distinction in a person's mind to either start to organize in a better fashion of what they could be ok with losing, or jump deeper into the never-ending hole of "I need $600 4-bay NAS to fit my 800-4000GB worth of HD porn....and some family pics and vids.
LOL.

Steam is something that does help with the gaming aspect of it, as we can now just leave it on our account, keep the save files, and delete the game.

Yup, i double burn all of my important things to Sony BR 50G disks, best they got and do 2 copies and store sealed.

now a days if you need something you can always find it again anyways.
 
Get more than two, and go RAID 5. Wastes less space that way.

NOOO you do NOT use raid 5... unless you want to lose all your data... 1TB drives and larger Raid 10 or Raid 6, period and as we all know Raid is not backup anyways.
 
Get more than two, and go RAID 5. Wastes less space that way.

Raid 5 is NOT the same as having a backup. It's main purpose is to decrease the down time (if a drive fails you are still up & running). If you get a virus or the volume gets corrupt, you risk loosing everything on the raid. Plus, if your raid 5 is using desktop level drives, and your raid is larger than 6TB, there's a very good chance you will lose everything if one of the drives fail, due to the error rate on the other drives.


Most home users would be better off, just making a backup once a week/month and storing it off-site.
 
I have movies on my HTPC that I know I will never watch again and yet I can't bring myself to delete them...
 
I am a digital hoarder. I store a lot of crap on my drives,
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my wife is... go on vacation take 20GB worth of photos because it's easy, and she totally won't go through the pictures and remove the 19GB worth of crappy photos that didn't come out, were blurry, the same as something else... worst of all she throws them on the SSD drive on the computer, pisses me off when I see I have 2GB remaining... WTF!?

My wife has recently begun doing this with Skyrim and other game mods.

I am guilty of having a huge log of Amazon Digital/Steam/Origin games. In fact, I don't think I have enough storage space to store all of them if they were all installed simultaneously.
 
I have a 3TB rotation where old stuff gets deleted as new stuff comes in.
 
With access to the web’s infinite amount of information and limitless supply of storage, digital hoarders are less inclined to think they have a problem.
Just a heads up, that data and information may or may not be around forever.
Copyright, laws, owners, governments... these things can all change and can make or break the Internet, web sites, and cloud storage as we know it.

The dumbass who wrote the article kind of forgot about MegaUpload; this same thing can happen to YouTube, Facebook, or any other site at any time.
So yeah, hoard away, lest you be caught with your pants down. ;)
 
Guilty as charged.
Over 600 Steam games, over 100 GoG games and movies, over 500gb of eBooks and eComics sorted like an OCD freak.
You should actually see my physical collections when they're not packed away in totes and on shelves. They went to totes because I've been watching too many ten or less year olds and they just LOVE to make a B line for anything organized.
 
Get more than two, and go RAID 5. Wastes less space that way.

Yeah, that's nice for uptime, but it isn't a real backup solution; I pity you if you are using RAID5 with desktop-class drives as well, yikes.
Offsite and/or offline backups are the best.
 
The big distinction between physical and digital hoarding, of course, is that the relative storage requirements for the former increases linearly with time, but decreases exponentially for the latter (assuming Moore's Law, or Kryder's Law, or whatever continues to hold). Reading the actual data assuming it's not in a well understood format like TXT/JPG/TIF, though, is still a PITA.
 
I suppose digital Hoarding would be a thing, if you house turns in a Data center.

Me personally I have around 6 TB of stuff on my computer. Still have space for more stuff :D

I guess now is the time to be a digital hoarder as well Seagate just released cheap 8TB archive drives :-D
 
So many pictures and video. A long term strategy for archiving digital content is a big problem.
I have resorted to using older IDE drives but despite redundancy I still don't consider this a permanent solution. I would love a cheap archival optical disc.
 
Amateur. If you're a REAL hoarder you get TWO drives to back up the files on the other one!

When you factor in the size that drives are becoming and how much junk you're able to throw on them, you might as well get 2, because a single drive dying is becoming increasingly catastrophic as the storage capacity goes up.
 
I am. I haven't deleted a single show or movie I have downloaded in12 years. Shows thatI wwill never watch, but can't stand to get rid of.

I also buy and download games, but I haven't played anything other than Arma in 5 years.

I download porn, lots of porn, and watch next to none of it.
I spend hours on my PC and phone browsing 4chan and saving porn images. I have millions on my PC. For example, on my phone this week alone, I have 1100 saved pics of porn. I'll dump it all to a drive and never, ever look at it again. 1100 this week from my phone alone.

My wife is a photo junkie with our kids. She takes between 400-1000 shots a week of our kids. I have to take in her Nixon d5100 after xmas because the shutter isn't working properly anymore. We never, ever delete anything.
 
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