Data Hoarding, is it a thing?

Another thread inspired me to open this one, which mentioned needing recourse to 50TB. It appeared to be for personal use, but I may be wrong. Is Data Hoarding now a thing? I mean keeping tons of it that one will probably my never really get around to utilising. Some people hoard all sorts of stuff in their homes, it’s a barometer of insecurity. I confess to bring one of those. I’m not too bad with data… yet.

Esel

If it was actual tons of data, like paper, then yes. Otherwise no.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118344176#Comment_118344176

Data takes lecky.

Esel

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118344456#Comment_118344456

True, but you said 'tons'... 🙂

StupidLikeAFox

Better to be looking at it than looking for it!

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118344620#Comment_118344620

Euphemism, cawlur, as we might say on Liveline thread.

Inotherwords, would it matter a jot if/when an awful lot of us have likes of 100TB personally going on? Effect on environment etc?

Gregor Samsa

It’s not data hoarding, it’s curating a digital archive.

And it’s not furry midget porn, it’s anthropomorphised diminutive spirt-animal erotica.

And it’s not 50TB, it’s on a Raid 1 array, so it’s 100TB.

BrianD3

I started a thread about saving files from floppy disks, there wasn't a lot of interest

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058093399/floppy-disks-and-the-files-on-them

I probably am a hoarder of data - I have every email I ever sent or received going back to the 90s. All my college notes (paper) from the same era. Also have lots of other people's files and personal data that they carelessly left on public network drives. CVs and job application forms with Leaving Cert results on them.

Are we counting photos as data? Then we're into talking about hoarding porn. I have a lot of it but will likely never look at most of it again.

I'd say there are plenty of lads out there that have hoarded social media pics of women they know/knew, co-workers etc. to use as....material. LOL.

TheValeyard

This guy tried hoarding Data.

Did not work out.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118344739#Comment_118344739

I have curated digital archives, thought I ate a bit of data until I learned I reside in a currently primitive era. On the Liveline thread a very amusing totally tongue-in-cheek quip went “every time a tragedy of Boards occurs a kitten dies”. But it reflected a tad what what being discussed on the radio show about Dara usage. We are so aware of plastics and palpable physical elements now, less aware of the ephemeral energy consumption, and I hands up first in the queue to be accused.

Victor

I have files going back to about 1998, but it only comes to about 3.5 TB including copies.

I HAD files from that era, lost in the mists of time. Some tidgy data on ZIP disks, I keep as antiques now along with a very robust little external drive.

KildareP

Depends really.

If video production is your gig, then shooting and working with RAW or ProRes formats could eat up hundreds of gigabytes for every hour of footage so 50TB would be nothing really.

Or if you're a photographer that holds all of your shoots in an archive, a single shoot might be several gigabytes in size, if you're out shooting most days of the year then you could still add several terabytes into an archive year on year.

But then there's others who go and rip all their CDs, DVDs and BluRays onto a NAS media server so that it can be played on demand Netflix-style without having to load the disk in each time.

Fr Tod Umptious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118344906#Comment_118344906

On your original post about floppy disks and about how "a lot of what happens in workplaces is pointless bollix".

It's not really

Those spreadsheets, reports etc all had relevance and value at the time they were created.

They may be irrelevant now and useless, but at the time they articulated information that you, your boss, or their boss needed.

bnt

I know it’s a thing for me, exacerbated by setting up plenty of disk space for myself a few years ago. My main PC has an extra Data volume of about 6TB that gets backed up to a 4TB external disk, so I don’t want to go over 4TB, really. An occasional check on that finds many GB of stuff that I can just nuke on the spot. It’s my own fault.

riclad

Hard drives are cheap, many people take 1000s of photos they, ll never look at again. I think the main problem is company's holding onto data they don't need, there should be a rule all data on old customers should be deleted after month . As company's are constantly getting hacked. Facebook had the data of 1000s of Irish users leaked online if you have data that's important backup it up to 2 drives and maybe use cloud storage Google drive mega etc if it's important to you hardrives stop working after a few years unless it's a SSD drive

My USB drive 60gig says drive empty easus data recovery says there's 600 mp3s on it

seamus

I guess data hoarding is only a thing if you are aware you're doing it. I mean if you have a particular hard drive that you use for backups, and then you get a bigger one and you just clone all the data across, then you wouldn't really call that "hoarding" I guess. Laziness maybe, but it's made too easy because it requires no effort.

If you have the option of curating the data though - and I mean there's a big folder there of 20 year old software that you haven't installed in 15 years and never will again - and you choose not to, you choose to continue to keep it, then yeah, I guess you could call that hoarding.

Like our friends' tale of his Windows 3.1 disk archive. I mean, if you consider yourself an historian, and wish to save the data because you know one day you can publish it in a library, then fire away. But if you're copying data off 3.5" floppies "just in case", even though you know full well it'll follow you to the grave, then you might want to give your head a rattle.

Nowadays if I find a floppy disk or a CD, it goes in the bin unless there's something really specific written on it that I know I want. Like "Wedding video" or something. I haven't used a CD for data backup in at least five years, maybe even ten. And I haven't used a floppy disk since 2004. So I know for a fact that there is no data on any CD or floppy disk that I actually care about keeping. If I cared, I would have written on it, or saved it in my usual place.

Ultimately the question about whether someone is a "hoarder" comes down to their willingness to part with it. If you are unwilling to part with something even though you have no actual use in mind for it...then you are a hoarder. If you have every email you've ever sent or received, and the thought of deleting them makes you feel sick even though you know you will never, ever look at it again...then I have news for you.

riclad

I have 5 hard drives laptop ill never look at again as they are old ide type units. I see no problem if you have music cds and dvds you rip to a hard drive if you want easy acess to them on your pc or laptop. I think alot of people have date on zip discs or data tapes old 40gig ide hard drives they'll never look at again as it's obsolete tech

Just make sure to destroy hard drives if there's data on them you may no longer need Personal photos or bank account passwords info logins to Gmail online accounts before you bring old pcs to recycling centres

riclad

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118352528#Comment_118352528

Yeah quality is the problem now, I've a digital music collection that's about 300GB that I put together over about twenty years but sure a large chunk of tracks are low quality mp3s and unlistenable these days.

I stream everything now but still transfer that same digital music collection to every new PC/Laptop that I get! Took so much effort to put together it's hard to let it go.

BrianD3

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118352371#Comment_118352371

If you don't consider yourself a historian or plan a library/archive you're a hoarder and that's a bad thing? There are lots of examples of material that was considered not worthy of archiving at the time and this was regretted later. E.g. TV programmes. RTE, BBC and others taped over their recordings as tape was expensive and they were thinking short term. Shur, who would want to watch Wanderly Wagon in 30 or 40 years' time. Wipe it. Meanwhile, some weirdo hoarders recorded broadcasts onto VHS or Beta tapes and kept them which is why a limited amount of lost material still exists. See Killian M2 on twitter who posts footage that people recorded from the TV, some of which was not archived by the broadcaster.

Even if 99% of hoarded data is or seems like pointless bollix, some day it might not be and data storage is very cheap.

Edit: there is some debate about just how much Wanderly Wagon there is in the RTE archives and they definitely archived some of it at least. Point still stands IMO

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118352416#Comment_118352416

I have those old ZIPs

riclad

Theres probably millions of drives out there ,old 2.5 or 3.5 inch ide or zip drives lying in a cupboard ,never to be used again ,like an old nokia phone that you dont have a charger to plug into

modern pcs use sata or ssd interfaces , you,d need to buy a special external powered caddy to use old ide harddrives .i dont hoard emails, there in the cloud ,i have about 4 gig space left before i have to start deleting them

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118354312#Comment_118354312

I’ve ancient, mainly auld stuff on them, must commit to cloud. But I loove the auld sentimentality as I remember buying a drive in OC World, thinking I was a little step ahead of the fragility of the floppy. Zips were thick robust floppy’s, loved them.

riclad

Anything was better than floppy drives they could not be relied on data or files would dissappear or become unreadable . there's probably gen z ers who never buy cds or dvds physical media all their data music and games are on online cloud accounts or just digital downloads on consoles ten years ago you'd go around to someone and you could judge thier taste by the cds or film dvds they had on a shelf . Some people would buy 100s of dvds or cds. The funny thing is cds wear out

After a certain amount of time they become unreadable

And there's a problem with console downloads some games are very large 300gig plus you end up erasing older games just to make space for new digital downloads even if you have a new console

seamus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118353055#Comment_118353055

Indeed, you've also got Alan Kinsella (electionlit) with an insane archive of political material.

I wasn't implying that you were necessarily a hoarder, but just considering that there's a fine line between a collector and a hoarder. If we take either of these two examples; imagine Killian M2 went dumpster diving and had rooms stacked high with videos he rescued from closing down Xtravisions, multiple copies of the same videos, stacks of magazines and newspapers which have a TV listing somewhere in them. But in general, it was all just a chaotic mess. You might call him a collector, but his collection would be functionally useless. If you asked him to put his hand on a particular video, he wouldn't be able to.

A collector has an order in their collection, they know how to access their archive accurately, and while they might have 2 or 10 copies of something, they wouldn't have 50.

A hoarder has no order in their collection. And usually no theme either. It's not just old TV programmes or political flyers, just a pile of random unrelated crap.

With data this gets fuzzy again I suppose, because you have search functions that negate the need to put any order on a collection. You can literally pile everything in one big mound, the system will let you search it.

BrianD3

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118355277#Comment_118355277

I read that Killian M2 has over 25000 home recorded video tapes that he has collected from car boot sales etc. No way of knowing if there is anything of interest on a old, badly labelled tape unless you play back the full tape. I'd say for every hour of useful material he gets, there could be many hours of useless stuff. E.g. someone might have recorded a James Bond film (no use) but if they left their VCR recording during the ad breaks, that stuff could be of interest.

His collection does look to be well organised in his house based on the pics online. The bigger the collection, the more organised it needs to be to avoid becoming a chaotic hoard.

Tagging your data is important, and especially for video clips where you might have to watch a long term of it to get to what you intended or hoped to see. One can create a database through likes of Access. I used to work in a library environment and created databases pre MS Office, pre Windows, which worked really fast and well if set it up, including your typical query macros nicely,

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118355277#Comment_118355277

Yep modern search functions work where in the past you had to always force stuff clearly into databases. In the libraries, pre computerisation, your relational database was two cards per item stocked in your overall universal catalogue so you could search under more than one term.