Their subreddit blurb (jokingly) is quite relevant to the article: "It's a Digital Disease!"
I feel like it's a balance between keeping redundant digital possessions (duplicates, outdated files, unidentifiable artifacts), having a healthy distrust of things persisting in the cloud, and a desire to keep a digital legacy.
> In our research sample, some people had gathered more than 40 terabytes (TB) of digital content over time.
Good lord. I need to step up!
Jokes aside, I, like others here, realize the surprisingly fragile nature of digital storage, even in the "cloud". I don't hoard things I don't need, I hoard things I know I won't find again in 10-15 years due to algorithm optimization, or a change in public opinion.
This also applies to family photos and videos that I will cherish and, had I not taken the time and effort, would gravely regret not having.
Oh man, I wish there was more written about this. There's quite a lot of content I may be the only remaining possessor of thanks to my (probably tism-related) need to not repeatedly waste bandwidth on things I may as well keep on local storage. There are huge swaths of content that creators have taken offline because it doesn't math their current branding or it had one too many "gamer words" in it. One look through your "Liked" videos on Youtube is enough to turn anybody into a data hoarder.
> In our survey of 846 respondents representing the general population, we found that digital hoarding can lead to higher levels of anxiety. Statistically, 37% of one's total level of anxiety, measured using an established depression, anxiety, and stress scale, was explained by digital hoarding.
I'm sorry: if there is a human who can attribute 37% of their total life anxiety to having too many files stored, they probably own a yacht.
We'd need to dig through the study itself and whatever information was available about it. But typically what you'll find what was that responders to the survey answered a series of questions about storage & anxiety.
The researchers then concluded 37% of their total anxiety came from the data stored. How this was reached is missing from this report it seems. Also there should be some sort of uncertainty or confidence interval associated with it.
I think it's worded poorly and that the implication is that people are experiencing anxiety thinking about their files due to concern about losing those files, not from having them in the first place.
I don't think it's a particularly good example that the article keeps talking about smartphone photos, because taking even mundane photos is at least a creative act.
Digital hoarding would be more like acquiring masses of TV shows and Music that you never watch. Or saving hundreds of articles to Read-it-Later lists (ahem).
> Some people had gathered more than 40 terabytes (TB) of digital content over time.
With a quick search I was able to find 16TB harddrives for sale, so you could easily fit more than 40TB in a single tower. Doesn't sound like their hoarding rises to the level of dysfunctional.
The issue is not for you but for those who want to have all users data on their systems, let's say "the big of cloud" who start having scalability issues...
You can fit 40TB in a tower no problem, however you have to remember to add disks for parity, and your backups should at least be a separate box. Doing it right adds up quick in terms of cost.
Indeed photos are the gateway drug to data hoarding. I'm at 128 TB myself, I now have Wikipedia dumps, millions of books, thousands of YouTube videos, papers, everything I can download pretty much.
You'd be surprised how ephemeral the web is. My favorite YouTube videos from 2010 are all gone, I'm glad I kept a copy.
For most people it comes down to not being worth taking the time to prune. Without attempting to shop around I'm seeing something like $25/TB for large drives. A photo and it's corresponding .RAW (for those of us who shoot cameras that record such) takes maybe 20MB unless you have some pretty high end gear. 50,000 photos per terabyte. 0.05 cent per photo. If you work at minimum wage that's about a quarter second of your time. You're much better off working and buying a bigger drive than in pruning unwanted photos.
The cost is in retrieval if you have to sift through the dross. Technologies like facial recognition and GPS geotagging can help a little, but ultimately you need curation.
Started downloading my Youtube liked videos back in 2009 (and keeping it updated ever since). +10k videos ~1.5 TB. It's pretty much nothing and a huge chunk of them gone forever from the site, especially pre-2010 ones.
Automatically you can only download the most recent 100 liked videos. So if you have a huge library first download the list (even Google Takeout supports that), you just need the video IDs then feed it to yt-dlp.
The rest, like quality, are personal preference. Like I usually max at 1080p and never download DASH videos.
When you are up to date you can still automate it. For example download once a week but I pretty much download everything asap even manually because I know Google can remove it quick or even sometimes the uploader.
Yeah, that happened to a channel I loved several years ago [0]. I've been scouring the internet ever since then, looking for mirrors of the channel, and one video in particular [1]. It's a long shot, but maybe you or someone else reading this could help, so I'll leave the links here:
Reality is probably nobody cares about your backups with old files. Except maybe photos/videos. But even that's to be debated. You're not that important.
The real issue IMVHO is that people do not know how to damn manage their own data. Most are still stuck at dealing with files and directories. Most can't even manage their craphone photos. As a result the pile up rubbish on rubbish not know what to do, it's a bit different than 'digital hoarding' IMVHO...
Some are hoarding because they have seen how entire sites or groups of videos or books (even a Dr. Suess children's book) can be removed... so if it is digital you need to store it yourself.
Yup. I mirrored a website with hiking information because I wanted it available offline. I'm glad I did because not too long after that I found it gone. I'm guessing the guy was afraid of being blamed because some moron got in over his head. Hey, if you're going off the beaten track you better have a good understanding of your limits! I'll admit he was writing expecting a fair amount of scrambling skill (more than once I found spots that made me turn back that he barely mentioned at all) but nothing about it was deceptive and it had a perfectly good warning that much of it wasn't just a walk in the park.
Unpopular take: life is ephemeral, the web too. That video you liked from YouTube that has since been deleted: it doesn’t matter. You weren’t going to watch it again. Content you didn’t create yourself has two categories only: so important it matters to other people so you don’t have to store it, and not important even to yourself.
Yes there is a risk of an item falling in between (being important to you and lost). Don’t worry. There’s other content.
Just this morning I downloaded a few videos from 2013, that i hadn't watched in years but felt like watching again, because i was concerned they would be removed some day. I have then spent the afternoon watching them again.
Your point of view is yours and yours only, I believe. You don't have a magic ball to see what is important to others.
There was a thread yesterday on M-DISCs and the longevity of DVDs etc (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33117813). It's sad - and perhaps strange? - that we don't have good write-and-forget storage solutions, it would certainly reduce my stress around backuping and curation
38 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 28.9 ms ] threadEvery year for birthdays we print out the top 100 and make a hardcover keepsake in case digital worlds come crashing down some day.
Their subreddit blurb (jokingly) is quite relevant to the article: "It's a Digital Disease!"
I feel like it's a balance between keeping redundant digital possessions (duplicates, outdated files, unidentifiable artifacts), having a healthy distrust of things persisting in the cloud, and a desire to keep a digital legacy.
(This is a joke of old reddit vs new reddit.)
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
Good lord. I need to step up!
Jokes aside, I, like others here, realize the surprisingly fragile nature of digital storage, even in the "cloud". I don't hoard things I don't need, I hoard things I know I won't find again in 10-15 years due to algorithm optimization, or a change in public opinion.
This also applies to family photos and videos that I will cherish and, had I not taken the time and effort, would gravely regret not having.
Oh man, I wish there was more written about this. There's quite a lot of content I may be the only remaining possessor of thanks to my (probably tism-related) need to not repeatedly waste bandwidth on things I may as well keep on local storage. There are huge swaths of content that creators have taken offline because it doesn't math their current branding or it had one too many "gamer words" in it. One look through your "Liked" videos on Youtube is enough to turn anybody into a data hoarder.
I'm sorry: if there is a human who can attribute 37% of their total life anxiety to having too many files stored, they probably own a yacht.
What a fantastically stupid sentence.
The researchers then concluded 37% of their total anxiety came from the data stored. How this was reached is missing from this report it seems. Also there should be some sort of uncertainty or confidence interval associated with it.
Digital hoarding would be more like acquiring masses of TV shows and Music that you never watch. Or saving hundreds of articles to Read-it-Later lists (ahem).
With a quick search I was able to find 16TB harddrives for sale, so you could easily fit more than 40TB in a single tower. Doesn't sound like their hoarding rises to the level of dysfunctional.
The volume is about the same as it would be with hard disks of 24 to 30 TB per HDD, but the weight and cost is much less.
You'd be surprised how ephemeral the web is. My favorite YouTube videos from 2010 are all gone, I'm glad I kept a copy.
Automatically you can only download the most recent 100 liked videos. So if you have a huge library first download the list (even Google Takeout supports that), you just need the video IDs then feed it to yt-dlp.
The rest, like quality, are personal preference. Like I usually max at 1080p and never download DASH videos.
When you are up to date you can still automate it. For example download once a week but I pretty much download everything asap even manually because I know Google can remove it quick or even sometimes the uploader.
Yeah, that happened to a channel I loved several years ago [0]. I've been scouring the internet ever since then, looking for mirrors of the channel, and one video in particular [1]. It's a long shot, but maybe you or someone else reading this could help, so I'll leave the links here:
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20151129103353/https://www.youtu...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20151130132704/https://www.youtu...
Yes there is a risk of an item falling in between (being important to you and lost). Don’t worry. There’s other content.
Your point of view is yours and yours only, I believe. You don't have a magic ball to see what is important to others.