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Delete Never: The Digital Hoarders Who Collect Tumblrs, Medieval Manuscripts, and Terabytes of Text Files (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Online, you'll find people who use hashtags like "#digitalhoarder" and hang out in the 120,000-subscriber Reddit forum called /r/datahoarder, where they trade tips on building home data servers, share collections of rare files from video game manuals to ambient audio records, and discuss the best cloud services for backing up files. The often stereotyped hoarders letting heaps of physical items of questionable utility dominate their homes and lives often suffer social stigma and anxiety as a result. By contrast, many self-proclaimed digital hoarders say they enjoy their collections, can keep them contained in a relatively small amount of physical space, and often take pleasure in sharing them with other hobbyists or anyone who wants access to the same public data.
[...] Many people active in the data hoarding community take pride in tracking down esoteric files of the kind that often quietly disappear from the internet -- manuals for older technologies that get taken down when manufacturers redesign their websites, obscure punk show flyers whose only physical copies have long since been pulled from telephone poles and thrown in the trash, or episodes of old TV shows too obscure for streaming services to bid on -- and making them available to those who want them.
[...] Many people active in the data hoarding community take pride in tracking down esoteric files of the kind that often quietly disappear from the internet -- manuals for older technologies that get taken down when manufacturers redesign their websites, obscure punk show flyers whose only physical copies have long since been pulled from telephone poles and thrown in the trash, or episodes of old TV shows too obscure for streaming services to bid on -- and making them available to those who want them.
I suspect the real hoarders are those who collect porn.
I have too many PDF scans of Byte Magazine on my iPad. #digitalhoarder
I count about 8 Tb spread across several machines as my current disk usage. Wondering if this is high, low or medium in technology sectors. None of it are videos or animations. Not much of bmp files, or binaries. Images are, at best, jpgs.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
History, culture, thought, and knowledge has been recorded on and in physical media for thousands of years. Now it is not. Unless we make progress in the archiving of digital works, historians of the future will simply have nothing to work with -- the end of history, as Fukuyama says.
This sounds entirely different than hoarding. Hoarding involves buying junk that everyone has and keeping it for forever in your labyrinth like house. This is more like digital preservation. Years ago someone kept all the Usenet posts, and now (for better or worse) you can read them all because someone preserved it.
It's actually true that you never know exactly what might be useful in the future. We dig up junk from the past and call it archaeology. Archive.org has been attempting to preserve the whole web since its inception. Is that hoarding, or preservation?
I was just looking for another way to backup my NAS. I had been using CrashPlan on Linux but as I have approached 7TB I’d data, mostly unedited video, and lost my baseline, it has become way to slow. :)
It is interesting that if I want to backup 10TB, the cheapest solution I have found is to place a small QNAP (1 or 2 drive) at a friends house and run run sync backup between them. It has a break even at 1 1/2 year, power bill included. Since we are on 100 megabit internet it is fast enough.
Was looking at backblaze b2 as alternate solution.
I am not aware of any other backup provider than CrashPlan that offers unlimited space using a Linux client. The speed issue seems to be a single threaded java program that does client side deduplication. It will take me 7 months to reestablish baseline. 2 months when I exported the VM with the backup client and ran it on a cpu with faster single core performance.
L'Idiot
CrashPlan closed their consumer-facing unlimited storage cloud backup option because of people like this. It wasn't the 98% of the people using the service but the small minority of folks that backed up terabytes of data in collections like those here that made it unprofitable for them to continue operating. The digital hoarders really killed that service, ratter than the regular users.
People pretty much will collect anything and everything if possible. So it shouldn't be a surprise that there would be folks who collect data. The interesting part is going to be what happens to that data when they pass away?
I kept copies off all email from the late 80's until I retired. Any conversation that started with "I didn't order you to do that ..." ended with "... here is the email exchange where you did. Is your memory improving now?"
There used to be the notion of data retention, it was embedded in mainframes and OS stacks dating back to the 70s to prevent this kind of thing. Data owners had to take proactive steps to ensure retention. I myself have found that a few DROBOs filled up act nicely to preserve all that ancient knowledge, like my old MSDN CDs that had all the C++ documentation before they purged it in favor of C# and my Leisure Suit Larry collection. So don't call us hoarders, call us digital monks of the digital monastery saving history for future generations.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
TFA calls these people "hoarders," but I'd liken them to modern day librarians/historians. Preserving and maintaining old data is a noble endevour in my opinion. I still come across and enjoy listening/discovering old music that was created before I was even born. When I was a child, there were tons of video games advertised that I did not have the money to buy nor the hardware to fully run it on. Nowadays, I can download many of those old titles for free and run them in fairly good emulators on modern hardware. It's great!
What these people are doing is preserving or archiving information to share with people. As other's have posted, also known as data retention.
Someone who hoards, hides away what they accumulate.
The two are not the same. But since the term "hoarder" is en-vogue people want to use it for notoriety's sake. Morons.
Hoarder No 1: NSA
Hoarder No 2: Google
Hoarder No 3: Facebook
etc...
aaaaaaa
Honestly this story will now be the only reason I'd own an reddit user account, I've maybe visited once or twice but never anything fancy going on! Now there is!
If I'm honest I still use efnet and others in order to download materials I need or am researching but now, reddit too for finding others!
Awesome story, they ain't really grubby shut-in hoardors though, I'd reach for fluent archivists, digital librarianship ain't new though..
wisecorp
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Mystery Red of the Great American Eclipse
It has blood on it!
ABCNews: Eclipse makes pendulum wander
Sun researchers find strange eclipse reading
It wasn't the 98% of the people using the service but the small minority of folks that backed up terabytes of data
It sure seems like 1-3% of customers storing many terabytes of data would come off as a rounding error in how much storage you would actually need to store hundreds of thousands of customers worth of data anyway...
They would also be doing you a bit of a service by stress-testing everything for extreme cases.
If that much more data is seriously a problem, then why not offer tiers like 0-2 TB (normal people), 0-20 TB (digital hoarders or serious photographers), and "unlimited" which reflects the true cost of storing a petabyte of data on average? You could migrate from unlimited plans to that structure, affecting almost no-one and shedding the customers you didn't like anyway (or making them pay reasonable costs).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There was an effort to save the adult tumblrs to some external archive before the porn ban.
Don't think it was successful though.
...to invite them to dinner, isn't it ?!?
Hoarders often forget what they have due to the size of their catalog, and effectively finding something isnt easy or even possible sometimes.
Did they resolve this digitally? Or is a sea of the unknown part of the allure?
I have petabytes of Hentai stored on blu rays so that after the Trump presidency we can rebuild the world supply of cartoon titties.
Digital media since before the mp3 but I've never bothered with protecting the data. Despite my piecemeal approach, the collection has grown to truly staggering size.
Every crashed hard drive is like a black hole in my collection. Movies_Drive_VII No longer exists. Same with APPS_TUNES_III. It's OK at this point though, as I've gotten so good at finding this stuff on the net that it's like I already have everything.
Eventually, I just nuked my entire GAMES series, as those are so available on so many legit platforms already, and my collection all was dated first releases riddled with malware anyway. I replaced this series with CONSOLE_GAMES, and proceeded to track every file I could find. Vindication came when Nintendo went on it's crusade against the ROM sites, which made it a little bit harder to source their games.
Sources are all over the place. Of course there are torrent trackers, and usenet, but most of the time, the best collections are found hosted on an open directory, or loaded into file sharing sites. The later can actually be miles faster than torrents if you do it right.
I used to do this like it was some sort of crusade against the media companies; like I was taking my revenge for every time copyright was extended and public domain got the shaft. Now I'm more honest with myself. I do this because I can.
THERE WILL ALWAYS BE CONSEQUENCES FOR YOUR LIES AND PROPAGANDA NAZI FAGGOT KEN DOLL UNTIL TRUMP HANGS AND YOU ARE HUNTED FOR SPORT TRAITOR.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Hoard random data in the terabytes.
I remember Paul "Pee Wee" Herman got hit for having Child Pornography he'd bought in a massive lot of vintage photos. He was wealthy enough to fight it off and win, but he also won because it was physically in sealed boxes so when they raided him he could legally say he's never set eyes on the stuff. With digital you can't really do that, so unless you're so rich folks look the other way (like Epstein) your life is over.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So this is what Vint Cerf meant by 'digital velum'...sort of.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Reference: Vint Cerf Digital Vellum
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
As more sites turn to memory hole policies designed to erase the existance of people and thoughts, archives will be our only saving grace (no pun intended). Question is what of value should be. There are certainly things around the US Elections I'm sure both parties would love to remove. But it's the little things you likely will never notice. If Merriam-webster.com redefined or worse removed a word, most people wouldn't notice. They don't publsh change logs and their "top words of the year/whatever", are usually biased.
I hope one day ipfs becomes mature enough to use.
Capatcha: eclectic
the wayback machine anyone?
Maybe they should talk about that too.
I'm 99% sure these guys are hoarding porn, and claiming to hoarding everything else is what they tell their mom.
Or we need to have an intervention for all those museum curators who accept donated collections only to store them away in their sub-basement for decades at a time. Oh wait, that's more about being a disproportionate tax deduction for the donor, rather than hoarding. Never mind!
Look what I just found in my extensive digital records:
Digital Hoarding Can Make Us Feel Just as Stressed and Overwhelmed as Physical Clutter, Research Suggests — 8 January 2019
And, no, I don't feel stressed in the least.
Archivist-hobbists are hoarders without the restrictions on floorspace that physical hoarders have.
It's time we grew up and learned the ephemeral nature of reality.
No, the unsustainable terms of service ("unlimited") were the problem and that was always strictly under the control of the service provider, in fact that offer predates any of the clients using the service for what it was said to be. Microsoft made the same bad choice with its storage system which was once offered on an "unlimited" tier. Nobody has unlimited quantities of anything so offering such is unrealistic. It's not a client's fault for taking a service provider at face value and using what is on offer. It's the service provider's job to offer something they can sustain. Blaming the client for maintaining the provider's business is either a gross misunderstanding of who is in charge of the service or an attempt to shift blame and hold a service provider harmless for their unsustainable ideas.
Digital Citizen
collect all those rare files and put them on a cloud, because, you know, then they will be saved forever!
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
My rule is to download and save anything I see that I want - because it can and often does disappear from the Internet. I have a disk full of things that you couldn't find anywhere now, going back decades.