Digital Packrats

meganthom writes "According to the BBC, Britons have been hoarding digital data, with many carrying the equivalent of 10 trucks of paper "weight" with them at all times. A survey by Toshiba found that 60% of Brits keep 1000-2000 music files on their portable electronic devices. Do increases in storage capacity appeal to some basic pack-rat nature?"

Comments

I'm a digital packrat

[Fig, formerly A.C.]

I save old downloads, images, all kinds of crap on my server. I even have DX5 updates from when I first installed them. Right now its around 250GB of crap.

I carry a USB stick with my financial balances on it, as well as some other stuff. Good stuff I browse at work gets saved there. Every so often, I need to dump the accumulated debris off of it. It goes right on the fileserver without even being sorted.

I'm a packrat in real life, and with me it does carry over into the digital world.

Packrat mentality

[dmacleod808]

I used to collect everything, mostly books and cds and videos and such. Now my packrattedness(is that a word?) has transtlated to the digital word, My 1.2 TB of space is for collecting as much digital crap as humanly possible, mostly out of some sort of obsession, I don't think I watch/listen/read 75% of what i download. I figure somewhere down the line someone will want one of the various things i have. Also its kind of like a time capsule, with a wide variety of genres, books/music/movies/tv/games.

keep it under your hat

[Doc Ruby]

No, it takes an extra effort to delete digital objects, rather than the "gravity destructor" and "live rot" out there in the physical world. That's why I have every email I've sent/received for decades. I always wonder at people who delete their messages - why are they working so hard to be clueless later? Is that why they're usually so dumb in the physical world, because they exert effort to "unlearn" what they've learned, among other bad habits?

Don't Understand

[Apreche]

I really don't understand these people. There are people here at college who download music and movies and keep buying more and more drives. What the hell is the point? Download something, watch or listen to it as you will. And then, when you aren't going to listen to or watch it ever again, DELETE IT.

Nooo. Instead we've got students here with spindles of CD-Rs full up with anime fansubs they are never going to watch again. I know a guy who has every episode of MST3K ever in a giant spindle. I don't think he's ever opened it. I also heard a buy bragging the other day about his 400 gig drive with only 20 gigs free because he filled it with movies.

These people are just stupid. They feel that this data is a "posession" of "value". They have something in their brain that makes them feel that having this data does something for them even if they never use it. They need to get a life. I mean, in the worst case scenario I delete something that I do indeed plan to watch again, I can *gasp* download it again! It doesn't take that long.

But I bet the hard disk and optical media industries live on these morons. So at least they do some good.