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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.

6 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. “Cloud backup” by ruddk · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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. :)

  2. Modern day librarians and historians... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:Modern day librarians and historians... by Hylandr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This right here. However it's important to print out and distribute the survival stuff and how to rebuild our technology as the electricity required to access the repository of knowledge and culture is the first thing to go during a disaster.

      --
      ~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
  3. Re:Amateurs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why do you say that? Porn has a very short shelf life. People get bored of it quickly and chase what is new and novel.

    Given how much vintage porn from the 70s is easily found on most tube sites, you might be surprised ... hell, the novelty of women with pubic hair might do it for you if you've grown up thinking women have always been bare.

    If you only go for what is new and novel, you end up where most internet porn addicts get, that if it isn't extreme, offensive, and highly specific it no longer does anything for you.

    Do you have porn you enjoy looking at over the years?

    It's porn, given a long enough time from the last time you saw it, it still fills the same function. Changes in beauty standards and body hair don't really change that.

    People often are often more excited to hear old songs than new. Do you ever feel that way with porn?

    Sometimes, yes ... a bunch of years ago when Gonzo porn became a thing, it became a real turn off. No, I don't want to see you choking her, slapping her, or spitting on her -- it's a turn off, and in many cases it feels like it tips over the edge to being non-consensual. It skeeves me out when I'm alone, watching it with a partner (yes, people do that) and it becomes unbearable since neither of you wants to see that.

    Me, I like a little variety in my porn ... all ages, shapes, and levels of beauty are beautiful. Endlessly seeing identical women in identical scenes just feels hollow (even by porn standards).

    I can guarantee you, someone right now (pick any now that suits you) is watching vintage porn.

    I mean, sure, there are days when you want the little pigtailed candy raver in a lesbian strap-on scene ... there's also days when that 40 something mom going at it with enthusiasm is what works.

    You have to have variety, or you pretty much get yourself so that only one specific thing works for you.

    It also means if you get laid in real life (yes, that happens too) you will have such a screwed up idea of what you want that you'll be a terrible partner, because she might not be into whatever that thing is.

  4. Re:A quiet but growing problem by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well how much physical media has been lost, destroyed, degraded over the ages. The burning of the Library of Alexandra has been said to set mankind back Hundreds of years.
    During revolutions it is popular to burn and destroy material from opposing ideas. Storing and preserving such media is a multi-generational activity, which requires a lot of capital, as well danger (from such revolutions), Digital Storage is cheap, and big. For under $10,000 a hobbies in digital archiving can collect enough data to fill up the worlds largest physical library in physical media. If we have thousands of people doing this hobby, who will then copy the data to new media, we are better off then we ever were.
    The key advantage of digital media, the more times your copy it, the safer the data. Because a digital copy is an exact copy of the data. So unlike taking a Tape Recording of a Tape Recording by the 3rd or 4th copy its quality is nearly useless. Or trying to transcribe books, where errors from human translation happens (see the joke from Red Dwarf can happen.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  5. Re:Amateurs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Porn has a very short shelf life." TRANSLATION: "I have a very short attention span."

    I'm not being randomly insulting...this is a big problem, especially among millennials. Before you accuse me of being get-off-my-lawn, check out the science. Research lately has been pointing to the fact that multi-tasking, looking at multiple screens with different content all day long, is leading to a statistically measurable and significant increase in attention span deficit.

    I can see it in my roommate. She is 28 years old, and watches every movie on the TV with either a tablet in her hand for imgur/reddit/facebook/twitter or a phone in her hand for a video game. I'm quoting her the other day directly when I jokingly asked if she was physically able to watch a movie, 90 full minutes, without doing or looking at anything else and only using her mind to think about the one movie. She said: "I can't even imagine watching a movie without also tabletting!"

    Thus, what you feel as "I can't watch the same porn again a second time" I suspect is "I need to continually watch new porn otherwise my brain gets bored/distracted/detached/aware-of-the-abyss".