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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.
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!
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.