The issue is not space. The issue is the hoarding itself, and the messiness that is inherent in that.
As someone with almost no working memory and fairly bad long-term memory, I'm so happy to have this sea of digital (and analog) detritus to sift through, to help me remember who I was and what I saw.
Everything I ever downloaded, inside "Desktop/Desktop/desktop/backups/oldpc/desktop/downloads/desktop/" awaits layers of my life, ready to be explored anew. Everything from the silly gifs I got on MSN messenger, to .pif files pointin into the void to remind me of that game I once played so often it earned a spot on my desktop.
Terabyte after terabyte of who I was and what I did, it is my most important treasure, and I enjoy strolling through it in it's pure, raw form.
I have recently realized there may be a couple legacy drives that might not have been wiped that might have it. I don't have much hope overall but I've been meaning to dig them out and check.
this type of thing is one of the undersung benefits vs a sea of ad-hoc hard drives. yes, a central server/NAS (even just 2 disks) is expensive but it's also a central point you can rely on and centralize your backups.
you can't let it become a pile either way, of course. but it's much much easier to work on manual dedup with everything on a single big zfs volume so you can compare directories and try to fold everything in sensibly. and snapshots let you roll this back if desired, or clone and copy files back out of history.
I seem to recall there was an algorithm called "downward flooding" or similar that was designed to help identify this directory-tree similarity problem. But I can't quite locate it.
It felt like it would last forever...
It's like physical hoarding: If everything's organised, it's a delight in years to come, but if it's in a big box-o-crap, then it's the same as not having it at all (worse, I guess, since it takes up space).
Cost of digital storage has just completely plummeted, and keeping stuff organized, even remotely, really makes for enjoyable rediscovery.
Even the mediocre stuff is nice to go through if it's sorted.
Old photos, videos and other original content is the best stuff to save for when you're older.
What helps for sure is like you mentioned in taking things at a more curated pace, where one can organize individual pieces of content at the time it's encountered (eg: saving a web page locally you want to refer/link back to in the future, or buying some music when one likes it and properly/consistently tagging it).
I have tens of thousands of web pages saved for example and it's a wonderful resource as search engines have become poorer for many results and sites/pages disappear. Due to the habits formed over time with filenaming/organization it's also super quick to find resources locally.
Modern day hoarders. If it wasn't for the Internet and hard drives, they'd fill their own space with stuff. :)
Then that fact sat in the back of my head for a bit and I wrote it off since “yes you could record it all, but then what? It takes so much time to filter and edit that you’d have to make the choice between filtering and actually living”.
But now, we’ve reached the edge of a different threshold: AI will be able to do the filtering and sorting.
I suspect that this means those who stored everything they were even remotely interested in will have an advantage. They will be able to have AI reveal the gems that others will have lost completely.
I got through everything, deleted about a quarter, and even took about 10% of my CDs to the recycling/exchange place.
This would be much less practical with video.
I think the issue is space though, otherwise we would simply archive everything and deal with the problem of search. For example, if you had every podcast audio file, you could search them using AI with something like "male and female talk about hacking floppy disks" and leave that to compute a while.
Move it all over
Never think about it again
what good is a pile of mediocrity where you can't find the gems inside?
What's needed is a wayback-machine-esque archiving method, where you can just find old stuff, but locally and self-hosted! Unfortunately, it does take a bit of effort to setup and not at all easy/painfree to keep running.
So i guess my box of burnable dvds will forever be relegated to be just a display item.
I'm saving up for a new tape drive (will probably be LTO 8) ... I have some fairly serious data hoarding issues.
Though I've not used recordable CDs/DVDs for much for years, just occasionally when posting digital photos/videos up to a low-tech type who has limited slow Internet. These days online drives are large enough that I can keep everything I care to have to hand on a local RAID array for easy access, backed up remotely of course, and Internet access is quick and reliable so things that are less important or rare can be streamed or otherwise re-obtained easily. Maybe quality has improved over time?
A few files seemed to read without error reported by the OS (though slowly and you could hear the drives retrying the read a few times) on more than one drive but had corruption from one of them, we manually compared different files of the same name to pick the best. Considering this, I'm surprised how much we did manage to read successfully.
There were other things on the disk, MP3s and other such, though we didn't bother trying to rescue these (only the photos were of any significance) so I'm not sure if they were in any better/worse state.
Mildly interesting observation: he no longer had a CD/DVD/other reader in a computer at all. No desktop PC and his laptop has no optical drive. The only optical drive he has is a DVD player hooked up to his TV and that is hardly ever used, as most of what it would be used for he has access to via a streaming service or two. I suspect this is not uncommon.
Unfortunately they need to be considered before you need to recover the data, which my friend did not.
Also/instead having multiple copies would have been useful as one may have survived better (stored in different locations in case the environment in one makes the disk degrade faster). Though neither method removes the need to occasionally test the media to make sure you have enough workable bits to recover the data.
For anyone who doesn’t know already: they got popular (and probably created) for binary files posted to usenet. Usenet was a high-speed and low-completion platform where files got corrupted all the time. PARity files took the algorithm for RAID and created a new file that could live “next to” the binary files. If you had a 1GB file and 300MB of PAR/PAR2 files could could recover the complete original file even if 30% was missing or corrupted. It still works today on Windows/macOS/Linux.
As a not to others: if following this method for archive purposes, be careful how you are distributing these parity files and those that they relate to. If all your files are on the same physical disk/tape the one physical disk/tape being unreadable kills the whole lot so you are only protecting yourself against errors in individual blocks. To protect against more complete media failures (i.e. a CD/DVD being unreadable) you need to split the data over several disks/tapes. This matches how the system was used on usenet, where each post (of potentially many tens or hundreds making up a large binary post) was essentially a separate bit of storage media. At this point it may just be easier to have multiple copies, though note that even with multiple copies the parity information can be useful as you can detect bit and block level corruption and in many cases correct it (whereas with two copies you can detect corruption, as the copies no longer match, but have no reliable way of knowing which copy, if any, is correct).