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Comment by marcinreal | Hacker News Reader

I totally understand the desire to keep a record of the past, and space is cheap so why not. I used to be a big "digital hoarder", virtually never deleting anything that might be a bit interesting. But a couple years back I deleted most, though not all of the "archive" of past me. It was a great decision that I don't regret. The important things you did will still surface from time to time. It's also always cool to accidentally find a photobucket or google docs account you forget you had and look through it for 10 minutes. But I just don't find value in intentionally preserving a digital record of myself, and instead allow serendipity to poke my nostalgia centers on occasion. Sorry for the violating the spirit of the thread with a contrarian opinion. My point is just that I've done the digital hoarding thing for years and it turned out to not have value, for me.

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I am myself dealing with the effects of my digital hoarding and trying to delete as much as I can, but I do think that is different from this.

1. Photo apps like iCloud Photos, Google Photos, and Photo Prism are getting much better at auto organizing/cataloging what photos are and surfacing them together in much more interesting ways. More photos is now a plus instead of a minus. 2. You can always delete, but if you never record you can't go back and record (often).

So I take a Marie Kondo "Keep what Sparks Joy" approach and delete anything I find that I do not care for when I find it. I also sometimes pick an area of stuff I have and try to aggressively delete things I don't care for.

>It's also always cool to accidentally find a photobucket or google docs account you forget you had and look through it for 10 minutes.

I find that horrifying. I would probably scramble to delete that as soon as possible. Don't know about anyone else here, but having my junk float around the internet is mortifying. I delete unused accounts as soon as the thought of it pops into my mind.

Yeah like, dude deletes all his local files and is fine with personal stuff floating through the internets and randomly finding that stuff. I'd rather do it the other way round.

Different things are important to different people. I did have a "digital paranoia" phase but it gave me more anxiety than it was ever worth. :)

I used to save everything I did in the past. Over time, I've found that I almost never needed to access those files and most of that wasn't even useful for the kick of nostalgia. Old games? I already replayed them to exhaustion.

I learned that the nostalgia is not about the files by itself but my life context at that time. I don't miss old code or Old OS's. I miss that sense of wonder when I was less experienced and more naive, and everything was new.

>I learned that the nostalgia is not about the files by itself but my life context at that time.

I'm learning the same - whenever I feel nostalgic about playing an old SNES or PSX game, I've realized that it was just about that time in my life, and usually just watching a clip on youtube or listening to the soundtrack is enough to scratch the itch, rather than actually playing the game again

While your memory might be great now, it won't be so forever. Serendipity might not happen as often as you would like, and "important things" may not be all you want to remember.

I'm sure your parents or someone from their generation have actual, physical photo albums from their past - and that the experience of browsing through these photos brings back things that they haven't necessarily _forgotten_ about, but that they wouldn't have brought into active memory unless they were browsing through them.

Over the years I have experienced and built many things that I do not deem "important" to me, yet when I see them mentioned (even in writings by myself), it takes me back to that point in time - all the feelings, learning and discoveries that it brought to life.

An example is scrolling through a list of my repositories on GitHub. Some of the projects on there I have "forgotten" about, but with the mention of it I am instantly brought back and remember a whole lot more details - motivations, feelings, the ecosystem...

This is just the way I see it: unless you make a deliberate effort to scrub yourself off the Internets, most people leave a bewilderingly enormous digital footprint. I think that's what makes the analogy with the physical generation not really work: that generation had a scarcity of records, while we have an absolute over-abundance. For most of history, most of our conversations, creations, the way we looked, etc. were not recorded, so I just don't see this over-abundance of preserved records -- which is quite a novel thing -- as being important to the human experience. But definitely appreciate your perspective, thanks!

It’s not always about hoarding.

Legally it’s very helpful if you create a paper trail of your work

Yeah, I think it can be great if you're intentional about what you're preserving and why. To elaborate a bit, I went from having tens of thousands of emails a few years ago to "only" having about 5k now. I did that by adopting a strategy of aggressively deleting trivial emails. I apply "aggressive decluttering" throughout my digital life, with screenshots also (trying to stay on topic a bit), old conversations, failed creative projects, etc, and have found the benefits of less clutter to be profound.

I never really regret deleting something, but that could be because I try to keep my life simple, within reason, and focus on the future.

I also recognize, as you point out, that there are limits to this -- sometimes there is a genuine need to keep a record. As a programmer, my work is all tracked in git. For a creative professional, I assume that a basic requirement of that sort of job is an excellent backup system.

I always try to separate my data by importance.

I.e. photos and important documents are only about 50GB so very easy to keep. This would be the things that I wanted my family to keep, If I died.

Then theres random projects and files that I keep in yearly archives, just to look and remember what I was up to x years ago. That's also not huge amounts of data (1-2 GB per year).

And then theres data which I didn't create. E.g. movies, game installer,... Where a loss wouldn't really be a big problem.

I used to feel the same way. Then the internet forgot the stuff that I thought would be there forever. Now only a few remanants remain. I still look at my DeviantArt and Livejournal accounts when feeling nostalgic. Those will also one day be relics of the past. I should back them up somewhere.

The "Virtual Trash Can" approach can be a middle-ground. You keep records, but regularly move them to a NAS or any other storage that isn't something you'd accidentally wonder into.

In day to day life these past record could as well not exist, but you still get to go look at them if you're willing to make the effort to do so. Also being willing to lose these items if something catastrophic would happen relief a lot of the archiving burden.

Hoarding is way different from taking snapshots of your work.

Yeah. I meant that I don't see the value in keeping those snapshots for years and years. Space is cheap, but for me there was something unhealthy about the practice, which is why I used the word hoarding. Deleting the hoard was actually quite freeing for me, and it was a little surprising that I never actually missed e.g. the hundreds of screenshots of in-progress games I was developing. So I just wanted to share that perspective, not really expecting people to agree (almost didn't post my comment at all.)

I actually like when such findings evoke older emotions in me, puts things in perspective for me, how much have I grown and how much I am still the same etc etc

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