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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 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
I suspect the real hoarders are those who collect porn.
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. With music, you can get joy from listening to a song over the years. Do you have porn you enjoy looking at over the years? People often are often more excited to hear old songs than new. Do you ever feel that way with porn?
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
I feel this way with my wife. I never get tired of her, although I know this is not really common.
You're revealing more about yourself than about the world.
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?
It's more common than you think; I never get tired of her either
You're both in trouble. She told me she's sick of you both and thinks you're just going through the motions, too.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think the difference would be if they classify and organize the data. Or they just dump it all to the D:\ Drive (or /mnt/Archive directory)
Data is useless if you cannot find it again.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Hoarder No 1: NSA
Hoarder No 2: Google
Hoarder No 3: Facebook
etc...
aaaaaaa
"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".
To be fair, even if you never archived or organized any data, most competent OSes have file indexing that allows you to still search through a pile of random crap and still have a half-assed chance of finding it... doubly so if that crap is ASCII/text-based.
One time, that indexing even saved my bacon, allowing me to reconstruct roughly 180GB of suddenly disorganized-by-filesystem-error-then-recovered CG asset (Poser-readable) files. I still keep that directory hanging around today, as it contains stuff with vintages reaching back to 1997 or so - it's fun to mount it into DAZ Studio and fart around with it (and sometimes resurrect some of that stuff thanks to SubD, CollisionDetection and Shader-baking, neither of which existed on a real practical level back in the day.)
Also, that pile of disorganized digital crap never rots, never molds, never gets infested with (or crapped on by) mice, degrades from plumbing leaks, etc. This allows for the possibility of future re-organization into something useful, as long as you have a means to read those files (like in my example, as long as I have something that can import Poser's ASCII-based .cr2/.pz3/pz2/cm2 and Wavefront .obj files, I'm golden. Otherwise, I'll have to mass-convert it all by batch, which I'm probably going to do before the end of this year...)
There is of course the risk of data and filesystem corruption, but compared to the piles of random crap a physical hoarder keeps laying around the house in mass quantities? Two different animals altogether.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/...
...to invite them to dinner, isn't it ?!?
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
In a sense, it IS kind of like having a house with rooms piled floor to ceiling.
Consider for a moment the data on a 250GB USB1.1 hard drive frome sometime around 2006. Ignoring for a moment the increasing annual possibility of drive failure due to age, imagine trying to look for a file on that drive. At USB 1.1 speeds, the disc is for all intents and purposes locked away and unusable (at least, from the perspective of Windows Explorer or Gnome 3's file manager, especially if the computer has antivirus software running that decides to try scanning the entire drive before it'll allow you to do anything with it). Connect the drive to a computer running a minimalist Linux distro and use Bash to copy the files to a newer, faster hard drive, and it's probably going to take DAYS for the copy to complete. Even if you rip the drive out of its enclosure and connect it to an IDE-to-SATA-to-USB3 adapter, it's going to take at least half the day to finish, just because even pre-SATA IDE was shockingly slow compared to SATA2 or SATA3.
There's also the fact that hard drives are AWFUL for long-term storage. They can literally suffer mechanical failure after years of non-use... and if it happens, cheap recovery options are basically nonexistent. They start at 'ungodly expensive' and increase exponentially from there.
Non-LTH single-layer BD-R media is just about the best long-term storage medium available today (cheaper LTH media is no better than organic-dye DVD+/-R... it fades and has a predicted half-life of around 3-10 years before accumulating enough errors to prevent reading as a normal filesystem, and 10-20 years before accumulating enough errors for even forensic recovery to encounter nonrecoverable errors in at least a few files). But BD-R media is pretty slow to read compared to just about everything besides tape. So, once your BD-R collection grows beyond a certain point, you'd BETTER have some good way to at LEAST keep a copy of the file metadata indexed and on something like a hard drive or SSD, or you're going to be in a world of pain trying to someday even figure out what files you HAVE, let alone the contents of any file.
That said, if you had to pick a single media type for "throw in a box and forget about it until far in the future", Non-LTH BD-R is absolutely your best choice. Even if optical drives cease to be a common cheap CONSUMER item, they're all but GUARANTEED to exist in some form for bulk archival storage & commonly used by libraries, universities, enterprises, etc. Just be aware that getting a mountain of BD-R discs containing 40TB of data into a form that can be searched and browsed in any kind of interactive manner will probably itself require several weeks of effort.
Note: avoid the temptation to use multi-layer discs. Multi-layer discs have a lot more that can go wrong (and can manifest unrecoverable read errors for deeper layers long before a single-layer disc of comparable age would have encountered problems). Also, when you're storing data for the long haul, be aware of your goals. Requiring that the disc be directly-readable as a normal mounted filesystem without special handling is a MUCH more difficult goal than simply requiring that data be confidently readable by forensic means. A BD-R that Windows 2030 someday chokes on and rejects as 'unreadable' when you stick it in (because the malware analyzer choked on an unrecoverable read error) might nevertheless be readable just fine if you rip the raw bitstream from the disc using Ubuntu 42.06 and use a utility to reconstruct a corrupted UDF filesystem. And if you actually know what precisely you're looking for and approximately where to find it, your likelihood of getting it off the disc is likely to be high for decades, maybe centuries.
Someday, digital archaeologists are going to make careers out of using robotic disc-rippers and AI content-analysis to sift through exabytes of old data from the 21st century, searching for treasures like an old cat video from Youtube that HASN'T already been viewed 400 trillion times, or a fifth-grade book report from someone who later went on to become the 84th president of the United States.
the wayback machine anyone?
Maybe they should talk about that too.
Of course. In fact, most of that new porn you are looking at is actually old porn being recycled.
I'm not tired of my wife either. After 26 years of marriage, she still fascinates me.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
There are two kinds of BD-R (recordable blu-ray) discs.
The first ones that came out had a shiny metallic layer that permanently dulled when the laser burned it. The technology was used precisely because everyone knew by that point that recordable discs based upon organic dyes had a TERRIBLE track record for long-term stability. By the time development of BD-R discs began, nearly ALL 10+ year old CD-R discs had at least some unreadable sectors, and DVD+R and DVD-R had an even WORSE track record. The catch was, the first-generation BD-R discs required a totally new manufacturing process and tooling, so only a few large companies (like Mitsubishi/Verbatim) made them... and they were pretty expensive, especially compared to DVD+/-R discs.
A few years later, the industry decided that Azo-based organic dyes WERE good enough for the unwashed masses, even while simultaneously conceding that their long term stability was unquestionably likely to be inferior to the original BD-R discs. Basically, their argument was, "yeah, Azo-dye BD-R discs will start becoming unreadable after 5-10 years... big deal, most people don't need archival-quality discs with hundred-year lifespans, and anyone who does can still use the more expensive original kind." At that point, companies like CMR (legendary for making low-quality discs) jumped on the bandwagon, and started cranking out LTH BD-R discs by the millions.
The really SHITTY decision the industry made was NOT giving a unique, unambiguous name to the original non-LTH type BD-R discs. Officially, they might be referred to as "HTL" (high to low)... but you will NEVER see "HTL" as an advertised feature, nor is there any unambiguous logo, certification, or anything else that allows you to unambiguously determine that a given pack of discs is HTL type, and not LTH. All "LTH" discs will specify it somewhere on the packaging... but they won't necessarily go out of their way to make it obvious, and they'll often try to word it as though it's a selling point instead of a disclaimer.
Broadly speaking, the cheapest non-LTH discs are usually going to be at least twice as expensive as the most expensive LTH discs. Of course, you might always get lucky and trip over a liquidation sale or something, but most of the time, you can just ignore the cheapest discs entirely and take for granted that they're going to be LTH.
Likewise, store-brand and non-major brand discs are almost ALWAYS going to be LTH. Ditto, for pretty much any discs purchased at a big-box retail store like Best Buy or Walmart. For all intents and purposes, you're going to have to buy non-LTH discs online.
Take Amazon reviews and listings with a pound of salt. Amazon is NOTORIOUSLY sloppy with its "SKU-keeping". If a listing doesn't EXPLICITLY identify a specific model number or UPC, you should probably assume the worst. Likewise, if the listing says the discs are non-LTH, but it's merely "fulfilled by Amazon", double check the SKU or UPC listed in the ad. Amazon is known for being really sloppy about commingling things they view as "commodity items. By the same token, if the listing unambiguously identifies a SKU/UPC for a product you've confirmed is non-LTH, but there's one or more reviews that say it's LTH, that could mean EITHER that Amazon was sloppy and sent someone a pack of LTH discs despite the ad saying they were non-LTH, or Amazon's powers that be might have just gotten sloppy and lumped reviews for BOTH LTH and non-LTH discs together. Amazon really sucks about doing that. Either way, if you DO buy the discs from Amazon, my advice is to 1) MAKE SURE there's something in the listing that UNAMBIGUOUSLY indicates that the discs are non-LTH (preferably, a SKU or UPC that you've independently verified via the manufacturer's web site), 2) check the discs when they arrive, and don't be shy about demanding a refund if they end up being LTH after all.
Newegg is a little better. At least, as long as you stick to items that are literally sold by Newegg itself (the last time I checked, they
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.
Sex advice is why I come to Slashdot.
But it's also a case of whoever accumulates the most porn wins. Guy I used to work with ended up having his porn collection used as a navigation aid by commercial aircraft. If you knew where to look it was even visible from the ISS.
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
Broadly speaking, the cheapest non-LTH discs are usually going to be at least twice as expensive as the most expensive LTH discs. Of course, you might always get lucky and trip over a liquidation sale or something, but most of the time, you can just ignore the cheapest discs entirely and take for granted that they're going to be LTH. [...] Likewise, store-brand and non-major brand discs are almost ALWAYS going to be LTH.
This hasn't been my experience at all. I've bought several packs of the cheapest generic discs available on Amazon (Optical Quantum, Plexdisc, ValueDisc...), and all were definitely HTL. LTH discs seem to be rather uncommon and, strangely enough, more expensive (at least on Amazon). I guess it could be different in retail stores.
If you wouldn't mind, can you read the MID codes from those discs & post them here? (You can use a tool like CDspeed to read the MID code -- http://www.cdspeed2000.com/ ).
Ultimately, the MID code is the final authority on whether or not a disc is HTL or LTH, because it's how the drive determines its writing strategy.
My guess is that the manufacturer of the discs you bought just decided that it didn't even HAVE to identify its discs as "LTH" on the packaging anymore, and didn't.
I suppose it's not inconceivable that things might have changed... but absent a low-key industry-wide move to abandon LTH and return to HTL, I think it's MORE likely that the manufacturers just found a loophole that allowed them to stop disclosing on the packaging that a given pack of discs are LTH.
My own personal Amazon experience the last time I bought non-LTH discs ~2 years ago was that nearly all of the discs listed there said nothing whatsoever in the listing about whether the discs were HTL or LTH, and NONE of the non-Verbatim discs were HTL when I looked up the UPC or SKU number online.
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.
I think you are missing point.
Physical media in practical terms, isn't any better then digital media in terms of long term storage. There is a theoretical advantage, but practical there isn't.
The reason why Stupidity and Ignorance have stood the test of time, because we as humans are still animals, with primitive and instinctive actions, which have came from hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The urge to destroy a threat is in us all, as it is a good way to normally insure your survival. Now the problem with idea's is that they can be just as damaging, so our lizard brain kicks in, and we want to destroy it. It takes an intelligent person to fight the instinct and say it needs to be preserved over the threat it causes me.
But I always remember what my Stat Teacher told me, about 1/2 of the population has below average intelligence.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Yahoo categorization method was a good fit for the time. Altavita sucked, because we couldn't find what we were looking for. Google Applied better technology and helping categorize information better.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If it is actually a hard drive that means it has something other than an a USB interface. Remove it from its enclosure and copy using that IDE or, more likely, SATA interface. But at USB 1.1 speeds of either 1.5Mb/s or 12Mb/s ("Low Bandwidth" or "Full Speed" in USB parlance), assuming the disk is full, it would take between 2-10 days to copy all of the data.
But this illustrates a good point in digital preservation. It requires upkeep. You need to continue to move data to new formats as they become available.