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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.
Every time I get a new laptop, I take the files on the desktop of the old laptop and put them in a dated folder on the desktop of the new one. So on my current laptop, I have "Old Laptop - 2018-01-18". Inside that is another old laptop folder and inside that is another one. There are files that are a decade old in there which I haven't looked at in nine years, but I don't get rid of them because "maybe I'll need this one day and it only takes up a couple of MB."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Dual qnap boxes, one at a remote location with an openvpn tunnel from the remote qnap to my home router is the route I went too. So much cheaper and the data stays under your own control so long as you trust where ever you have chosen to keep your remote qnap. Use the full disk encryption with an unstored key and if the remote qnap were ever stolen it's data is inaccessable. You can get cheap older qnap nas units off ebay, They don't need to be exceedingly fast newer units. I just rsync my local qnap to the remote qnap on a nightly basis, takes maybe an hour for rsync to compare the contents of the two, longer if there is data to send over. If I ever get to the point that I need to retrieve a significant amount of data from the remote qnap, ill just drive over, pick it up, bring it home and retrieve with the thing plugged into my local LAN. Both my local and remote qnap are of similar config. 4 4TB disks in a RAID5 config, so just a bit under 12TB of remote backed storage for a one time fee of the hardware