this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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I tend to either act as a data hoarder, but most of the time end up being overwhelmed with anxiety about having so much data. Even when I just look at my personal photos, I just feel impeding doom knowing it can only grow and grow, it will never get smaller.

I was wondering if this had a term.

And coming from this question, I am just amazed by this community. What has prompted your interest in data hoarding?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (11 children)

Yep, I had a friend that matched exactly as the opposite of a data hoarder.
I asked him why would he behaves that way, not even saving the photos to hard drives when he switched to new phones. He said he hate his past, and there's nothing to look behind from present time. He had only few of his sport car's photos, few of his cat's photos, not much photos even moments with his girl friend. At the age of mid 20s, he has at most 1GB of his valuable data to keep.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Yeah, I once knew a woman who deleted her emails after reading them, back when it was more popular pre social media.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

IMO this was common in the past because inbox quotas were very small. With many services only allowing users to have ~10-100MB it was critical to delete things (especially attachments).

When Gmail launched in 2004, providing 1GB of mail storage, gradually increasing to 15GB today, people's habits changed. That said, my university email almost a decade later still had a 100MB quota and it was very painful.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

One forum I'm in still imposes a limit of 150 private messages. Feels like ancient times. There are only a couple hundred members, so it can't be that much storage fees. It's not like I absolutely need these messages, but I don't want to sort through / manually delete them every few months either.

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