How to quit data hoarding
Looking for advice from former data hoarders - how do you quit?
I spend a not insignificant amount of money and time hoarding, organising and managing my TBs of data. Most of it I never access. A reasonable chunk of it if deleted I may never be able to recover. Contrary to popular opinion, only a small proportion of it is grumble.
So for anyone who's managed to break the hoarding habit, how did you do it?
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About time we had a DHA group here. Very timely - perhaps I can save myself from the craziness of today and tomorrow.
Delete
Destroy
Re-hoard
Delete
Destroy
Re-hoard
Eventually you will be wasting so much time replenishing your lost data that you will give up and move on to better things
Michael from DragonWebHost & OnePoundEmail
rm -rf *
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news....
Convince yourself that everything you have been downloaded never gets deleted and you never loose access to the internet.
Which is a lie but maybe you can trick you brain into believing it, I recently talked to a guy that questioned why people need a NAS.
Sadly, even here, the Internet is as unstable.
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I often get a strong urge to use radiation resistant hoarding media.
Why?
You need real debrid in your life.
I have a few NAS where I store everything plus a whole bunch of external drives.
Once every year or so, I go trough most of my data looking for folders that have not been accessed for a long time and export it to external drives. First time I did this was as a temporary fix when I ran out of space, but then I realized that I never actually went back to the external drives to get that data. Some of the drives had been laying around for over 5 years without me ever even thinking about the data on them. That made me realize that I don't really need it, I have formatted and reused the drives several times now and never missed any of the data lost, so it really helped me break my hoarding habits.
I feel like this is what I need. Someone to convince me I don’t need an archive of below-standard def video of a sitcom I last watched 30 years ago.
I’ve wasted so much time already I’m not convinced that’ll stop me. Besides, I still can’t execute step 1.
Sir, my NAS just died.
Isn’t that like offering meth as a solution to crack addiction?
That’s a good idea actually, might be worth buying a few decent sized disks to break the habit.
Cold storage on things not accessed in awhile. Keeps the other stuff manageable and costs down.
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Exactly my thoughts. So is it back to the usual for tomorrow then? Are we par for the course? I guess to indulge is to eventually satiate the appetite and then all is well?
Where are the experts when you need one?
I came here to bury my hoarding habits, not to praise it.
Where are the friends when you need them?
Help... I'm craving some bits and my /dev/random is not yielding much. I have enough from /dev/zero and /dev/one but I'm not quite yet able to mix them in some unique and interestingly flavo(u)rful ways.
Help...help...elp...lp...p...W9{95NMg8B#IZ3|<IkCul7?:>_$e\ShK3zMy+-=6o-&b/A-ESz}-eF93OrkWl8IBYDxYWjAlGAVnucVTWPRQOJmh8y.
I used to hoard a ton of ISOs running into a couple of hundred TBs, all painstakingly gathered over the last 15y or so.
What I ultimately realized was that 75% of the stuff could easily be sourced again at this point, thanks to usenet and other sources. That, coupled with the fact that I do not have enough time to watch anything new (forget about a re-watch), I downsized my fleet of storage and media servers within the last couple of years and saved a good deal of money in the process - pandemic sure played it's part in making some tough choices seem easier
Having said that, I still have a decent chunk of rarities backed on up gdrive that I pay for, but it's under 25% of what my collection had grown to, at it's peak.
Faster internet speeds mean it's often faster to re-download on demand (if you know where to look), as opposed to searching across a bunch of drives. So, that worked out fine, for me, atleast.
Ultimately you need to figure out what would work best for you, and then stick with it for a little while. It'll get easier after that 😌
Yeah, thanks to all the good people who hoard and keep stuf - duhh!
Relja of House Novović, the First of His Name, King of the Plains, the Breaker of Chains, WirMach Wolves pack member
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Make friends with other hoarders.
Delete rarely watched videos that are being hoarded by many people.
Precisely how File Sharing is supposed to work. You'd be surprised as to how much of the content distribution and archival is scripted / automated and funded by communities. At the end of the day, growing up is realizing there is no need to archive 100% of everything individually.
I see your point.
But I can also imagine a pile of money when everyone who said, says, and will say "oh, Relja, you handsome devil, you must have that tool/file" starts pitching a nickle!
/ my points is on "someone will save it" - not on the money making potential (zero LOL)
Relja of House Novović, the First of His Name, King of the Plains, the Breaker of Chains, WirMach Wolves pack member
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For me it was forcing myself to actually "use" the stuff I was hoarding. If I was never actually listening to the music I was meticulously cataloging and archiving, what was the point? If I was never actually looking at the pictures I was tagging and organizing, what was the point?
When I started forcing myself to "use" the data -- watching the shows, listening to the audiobooks, whatever it may be -- it made me realize what data I actually cared about and what data I was hoarding for the sake of hoarding. Yes, sometimes the organization itself can be fun, but if I'm spending far more time doing that organizing than actually using it, it's mostly a waste of time (imo).
That mentality helped me accept the fact that, for example, it's not my job to be the archive for every video game ever released on every system, so now I only keep the ones I actually like, so like ~40 NES games instead of several hundreds. I pay for Spotify and use it (and my wife uses it even more than me), so the only music I now keep is the stuff that is both uncommon on streaming services AND stuff I actually listen to, such as some obscure soundtracks. For hosting, I kept my seedbox (which I also downsized), one VPS for a VPN in case it's needed, one VPS for remote backups of the important shares on my Unraid NAS, and the hosting for the websites I manage. Heresy to say here, perhaps, but I no longer have any that are just for idling/yabs!
On a related-but-different note, I also did a clean out of my old tech at home. I found all my old devices, looked at how much I could sell them for, then threw most away, and donated the ones that had any value. Why? Because I had looked up their value so many times in the past, said "oh hey I can sell this" and then it sat in the closet for another year or two, as the effort of posting/shipping was too high. So instead, I just donated the ones that had any value, and tossed the rest. And...I cleaned out the cord box(es) that I'm sure we all have. Now I only have maybe ~5 micro-usb cords, instead of ~35. I made myself toss those component and rca cables, because I haven't actually used them in 10+ years. And after cleaning out the old devices, I found that the vast majority of my old cables were ones I no longer need "just in case" ! So I have literally two or three extras (i.e. not counting the ones I am using) of common cables, ethernet, usb-c, hdmi, etc., and one or two of the cables that I "might" need for actual devices that I have (like one usb-b cable for my wireless printer, because it sometimes breaks), and that's it. Literally 2 empty boxes from cables alone.
Also, I didn't do this all at once, or even in a short period of time. Some of it took me weeks, or even months. But I allowed myself to be happy with the progress I was making, and not to "let the perfect be the enemy of the good" which is something I've frequently found myself doing in life.
It’s like we’re the same person.
So the real weirdness of this is how little spare time I actually have to consume the media. I have more anime, TV and movies that I can watch in my lifetime, assuming I don't develop chronic insomnia which leads to perpetual unemployment.
I blame streaming services for a lot of this. The way they operate and the fact you need 5,000 different subs to watch what you want when you want and stuff disappears regularly, so I hoard a lot of stuff I liked/might like just in case.
Music in the other hand I rarely worry about. Apple Music has almost everything and it doesn't go away, and in the event I ever untangle myself from the Apple ecosystem I'm pretty sure Spotify has me covered.
Video games also aren't an issue. I really only care about the systems from when I was a kid and therefore I have them all stored on a thumb drives and SD cards, even though I really only play the same 50-odd games.
If you really want to watch all of them, there's no other option than paralyzing it by watching two at the same time, one with your right eye and another with your left. You can create exciting content mixes by this.
Make it accessible through a web server and post it in the open directories reddit sub. You’ll rest easy knowing others are now storing your stuff
I've stopped with obsession to buy idling servers and "lifetime" software, now I'm into wrist watches.
Cursed circle.
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I could get into watches, but the initial outlay means it's never going to happen, thankfully.
I really think family photos and videos even though rarely or never accessed should never ever be deleted.
everything else can be easily deleted, it's hard at first but after you do that there will be a surge of freedom
I put family stuff at home and not at some server on the inet.
FORMAT D:All the data vanished, no more hoarding.
Unless you are hoarding in C:, then just wait for next system crash.
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