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Comment by shard | Hacker News Reader

I hoard digital media. I have thousands of e-books, movies, TV episodes, music, and games that I will never be able to consume in my lifetime. Not to mention all the time I spent obtaining the media. It does make me slightly uncomfortable to get rid of the ones I know I probably won't consume, but that feeling is mitigated by the fact that I should be able to easily re-obtain the items if I change my mind.

I don't know if this is related to physical hoarding, since I am an anti-hoarder when it comes to physical objects -- I prefer to have fewer things as opposed to more things, and have a strong aversion to what I call "cheap plastic crap".

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As long as you don't wind up spending extra money for more storage, and you don't waste lots of time organizing this media you'll never consume- well, it makes no difference whether the disk holds zeros or a movie.

Hoarding digital media has become kind of pointless with the advent of streaming services though. As a former DJ with eccentric tastes, I spent tons of time looking for, buying and cataloguing obscure music, then eventually digitizing it. But now I just listen to Spotify and Soundcloud, which already have virtually everything I ever collected and then some.

Of course, there are some gaps and the niggling sense of unease that something I like today might not be there tomorrow because of licensing changes or whatever -- but that's what cheap cloud storage is for.

I'm "hoarding" web sites with technical information. I've got TBs of disk where I mirror things. Because I started to notice that things just.. disappear. And they're not on archive.org, or their mirror is very incomplete. I'll never need 99.99% of the stuff that I copy.

But just yesterday somebody on a forum looked for information and mentioned a web site that apparently had that info at one point.. but had disappeared. Completely.

Except that I had a copy and could hand it over.

How do you easily mirror? I tend to use pocket for articles, but even that will not last. I'm also saving some youtubes these days.

wget will do the job most of the time. At least for the sites I copy - it's mostly directories with files (documents etc).

You should set up your own archive website with plans for long term (post-mortum) servers.

Why don't you contribute to archive.org instead?

It's not something I could do instead - it's something I would have to do in addition. And there's some problems with that - at the time I'm copying/mirroring, the site is out there on the net. Uploading (as in direct uploading) to archive.org of sites that exists would look a bit strange, I think. But if you mean to get archive.org to mirror instead - yes, I do that too, but the thing is, you can't get archive.org to recursively mirror anything. You can point save.archive.org (IIRC - they change the URL sometimes) to a not-yet archived site (or one which needs an update), and archive.org will copy that page. You'll have to click-and-walk through every page if you want archive.org to get a full mirror. And I have done that too, with a few sites. But that's a lot of time-consuming work. Just quickly mirroring a site that pops up during a technical discussion takes all of 30 seconds to set up.

I know this is dated, but if a website changes the current robots.txt policy, Archive.org will delete all the archives in response to it and not crawl it again

https://www.webmasterworld.com/robots_txt/4898080.htm

As a DJ, you would need that music preferably in 24-bit WAV, which is not something you get from spotify and soundcloud.

> As a former DJ with eccentric tastes, I spent tons of time looking for, buying and cataloguing obscure music, then eventually digitizing it. But now I just listen to Spotify and Soundcloud, which already have virtually everything I ever collected and then some.

Not to sound elitist, but particularly as a former DJ I'd have expected you to understand that there's a huge amount of music out there not available via any streaming service (Youtube and Soundcloud rips don't count).

I agree that Spotify & Co. are a no-brainer for most listeners. Great selection, very convenient, unbeatable price. Personally and as a music collector however, I consider buying and owning music as important as ever - I'd estimate that close to a third of my collection isn't available via streaming and there's no way I'd be willing to give up those precious, sometimes rare gems. And, as you already pointed out, even content widely available today could be gone tomorrow - licensing deals end. See Netflix.

> Youtube and Soundcloud rips don't count

Why not?

Too lossy for a DJ/audiophile.

I had the same attitude for some items I owned. They were now rare and hard to obtain. At the same time, I hadn't even looked at them in many years. I realized I liked the idea of having them more than actually having them. I also realized that there would never come a day where I suddenly realized I needed them and would be distraught if I didn't have them. So I threw them in the trash and I will almost certainly never care.

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