Data hoarders of LES, unite
This is a safe space, so I know I can say this without fear of judgement.
My name is Nekki, and I am a data hoarder.
I know this will come as a shock to those of you who have seen me begging around for storage servers over several years, but I hoard data. The why's and wherefore's have changed, but I still hoard.
I have no idea why I hoard what I do, it feels very much based on instinct rather than any logical set of rules. I am quite sure that I could not possibly hope to consume all the media I have hoarded in this lifetime (or indeed the next).
But enough about me - I'm interested in YOU. Do you hoard, and if so what do you hoard, and how do you hoard it? What dictates what you keep and what you delete? Have you ever purged, only to build the hoard back up again?
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My biggest fear is that, when I die, SWMBO will sell all the tools, parts and bikes at the price I told her I had paid for 'em.
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Same issue, but retro video games.
Hello everyone my name is AuroraZero and I am a hoarder. I hoard computer parts, data, and tools. I have no idea why I do this but I have some storage units full of stuff. I have purged once but it did not work out so well. I took the money and bought more stuff, then I needed more security for my stuff, so it cost me more in the end.
I am not sure I have ever deleted anything in my career. I have discs upon discs from the CD days. I have Hard drives that I have no fecken clue what is on them. I have tape drives and other old tech full of data. It just keeps growing and growing.
"I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for that meddling Frankz and Mason!!"
Currently in the process of dismantling my storage server RAID array. I never really used it to it's full potential, so I decided this week to re-use the drives for other things. I originally had 8 x 8TB in RAID6, but 1 drive was dead, 2 have some bad sectors. I kept 3 drives in the server to create a smaller (16TB usable) RAID5 array. Put 2 in my NAS in RAID1 to replace 2 x 3TB which are pretty old. Last 2 are for my main computer to replace some very old disks (500GB, 1TB) that I'm surprised are still spinning.
As for files, I have lots of music, pics, and videos that I backup. Have also been consolidating some family photos from our extended family. I have amassed quite a number of audiobooks, audiodramas, and podcasts as well. Most of this stuff goes on the storage server I have running at home. On the NAS, I keep backups and common programs/files I want easy access to from any machine on my local net.
There's also cloud storage, which is where I have a ton of media stored -
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I'm not ashamed to say I bashed one out over that screenshot.
Storage units full of stuff is serious.
The one thing I've always been careful about is collecting physical items, as I don't want my family to be inconvenienced by having to sort them out after I'm found naked on the toilet, chap in hand, Brazzers still playing on the phone propped up on the toilet roll holder.
A storage unit with an arrangement to burn/sell everything if the rent is 30 days overdue is a great solution though.
Dead man's switch!
Brilliant.
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I would be worried about that if I had anyone left behind. I don't have family anymore they all died off. I really need to clear that stuff out and have a fire sale or something. So when I pass over the bridge I will just be gone and no one has to worry.
"I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for that meddling Frankz and Mason!!"
Also a fellow data hoarder here. About 64TB raw of ultimately who knows what. Old applications, drivers for hardware long gone, pics, music, videos, programs I wrote last century in school, etc.
oh and of course backups of all the family members’ cell phones, computers, tablets that I have refreshed for them over the years.
Just recently literally gave away dozens of full computers (cpu, monitor, keyboard, mouse) cobbled together from all the leftover hardware I’ve been hoarding.
A few last items in January and I’ll be finally down to just my and the wife’s laptops, the home server and the 12 drives in the NAS.
Edit: saw this on Reddit shortly ago and thought those of us with ancient hardware we are hoarding would appreciate it
https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/zqkuf8/this_nostalgic_sound/
I feel like I'm not mainstream regarding that everybody posted before me is hoarding virtually everything. No real datahoarding here. About 250GB of data (mostly pictures and videos but not the one you think of :P) and literally no physical items, only few spare parts. Once I don't need the physical items anymore, I sell them on eBay or similar. I'm selling them not always to make money, sometimes I offer it with free shipping option and the price of the item is how much I've to pay for shipping, always hoping somebody finds a new use for this stuff and it isn't thrown away.
I was a data hoarder back in my early pirate days. If there was a new release of something - I needed to have it. Including stuff that I would never, ever use. Just to have it. Totally bonkers what I spent on storage devices in the 90ies. The older of you might remember how the costs of storage were back then. I even had hundreds and hundreds of those stupid ZIP drives back in the days. Only to store stuff that I did not need.
Nowadays, it's worse. I do no longer hoard digital stuff (besides a reasonable media collection), but physical items. It started during the Covid pandemic and my relatives will have a hard time going through all this shit when I am gone. I will try to reduce this in 2023. But it seems to be a biological thing. My soulmate animal is a hamster.
Amitz, a very stable genius (it's true!) and Grand Rectumfier of the official LESLOS® (LES League of Shitposters).
Certified braindead since 1974 and still perfectly happy.
You can quite imagine what i do store.
Live amount of the number of files over at https://cdn.foxo.me/
I hoard old equipment. I have about 30 8-bit computers (mostly the same model), but none of them have been plugged in for years. I have every PC I've ever owned (I think), including the 133 MHz thing that there's literally no use for. I have a ton of old Sun equipment I bought in 1999 when a local CAD company went out of business. I have a massive collection of old CRT monitors, because you never know when you might need another monitor. I even have retro games consoles that I've never played and don't have any games for. I've got electronics I bought on Kickstarter and played with a couple of times, but otherwise unused. I've even got quite a lot of electronics I've bought and never even opened, a lot of it is already a decade obsolete. I have several 14.4K modems and even an ISDN modem (which was second hand about 15 years ago, but I've never used) and modems for every version of ADSL, not of which are useful now.
That sounds like I just buy a lot of new stuff and waste it, but fortunately that isn't too true as I'm also very frugal. My main laptop is a 9 year old Dell XPS, before that I had a Lenovo laptop that I used until it literally fell apart. It had 5 replacement keyboards, a processor upgrade, 2 HDD upgrades, RAM upgrades, the case was falling apart after about 8 years, but I kept using it until about 10 years old when the screen failed as well. But even that, I still keep it because I could use it as a Linux headless machine (which I've done once). My desktop is 7 years old at this point, although I have a year old one I needed to buy for work.
I think the problem stems from my family having little money when I was young, so we learned to make use of the little we have, never throwing things away, fixing them when broken and repurposing them as needs changed. But then when I was doing well financially, I started buying more things to upgrade to, but still can't bear to get rid of the old stuff I don't really need any more, because it still "works".
This actually is something I want to address as I have several rooms full of this old junk, but perversely I like the rooms I spend my time in to be very tidy and minimalist, so having all these other rooms full of crap also causes me to be a bit stressed out!
If there's so much unusable physical stuff, why not return it to have it recycled?
I collect movies and TV shows. Little over 30TB so far. Is that enough to call it data hoarding ?
Why?
A lot of it is quite niche, and not zero-value. For instance, the 8-bit machines will sell for about £100 each on ebay, if and when I can ever get my ass in gear to sort through it and list it. It's just never quite worth my time to spend sorting through it all. The point is that most of it isn't unusable, which is why I haven't chucked it. It's mostly working perfectly fine, I just don't need it right now.
Also, recycling is only really suitable for recent stuff. People aren't going to go to the effort of trying to extract a couple of dollars of value by desoldering 10- or 20-year old chips from a motherboard, wherever I take this stuff, it's still ultimately just going to end up in landfill.
With unusuable I didn't mean defective just not generating worth for you in the near future. Recycling the metals could be a way but if it lands on a landfill this is no good option either.
How much does that Dropbox plan cost you?
I hoard around 450TB of content, most of it is just kept because it's very hard to find elsewhere. I attempt to be like a mini version of the Internet Archive and a lot of the cheap VMs I buy here are just used to scrape content for my archive.
And how do you get 450 TBs of storage?
Few 36 bay Supermicro chassis filled with drives, how else?
Damn... We need photos for @Nekki
It's the "Business Advanced" plan, so $24/mo billed yearly. In it with a few others since it requires at least 3 users. Has had much better performance than GDrive ever did.
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That makes sense. I was in it by myself, so the cost just didn't make sense. I did like the performance however.
He wouldn't be able to handle it (also I'd need to ask remote hands to snap a photo or two, I don't really keep pictures of my boxes)
I did find this one, it's one of my cache nodes so only 8x14TB hdd + 4x1.6TB NVMe
That is just awesome!
Pricktease
Thanks @Nekki for the nice introduction, and the others for the funny, openhearted and recognizable replies!
I started out as, well, at that age you wouldn't call it connoisseur, but a collector I certainly was.
Looking back, that lasted about until when Internet became widely available over ISDN and I started to have money of my own to spend, and I went from collector to hoarder.
There's a mix of "never know when it comes in handy" (many things did, actually), "won't be available at this price ever again" (on the balance... still true, not taking in account time and space lost on this hobby) on the ingress side, combined with "throw it away today, need it tomorrow", "it may be obsolete, but it's not broken" on the not-egress side. I guess it is a neighbourhood friendly version of the insecurity that Putin and the likes feel. You know what you have today, but you never know what comes next.
Along the way I did manage to replace (and more) a collection of books in shelves along the wall by a hoard of e-books on disk. Combined with a shelf of e-book-readers. I'm not quite sure whether it's a step up or a step down.
Real virtual hoarding is slow to start though. Most of it is still in limbo, virtual in my mind and lying ready as spare parts. I did manage to backup my hands full unused HDDs to stacks of unused DVDR though, so in case I make a slip when finally assembling my hoardingstation, at least I have a backup of what not was on those hard drives.
When it is up, it will run in the low double digits, enough to backup the less than ten TB of photos and videos (as in, 'personal', not 'private') and a dozen or so TB of backup of the family's desk-, lap- and handtop machines and Nextcloud instances, though apart from not emptying the trash can on those, that doesn't go under hoarding in my books.
edit: don't use markdown-marks when not intended
I hoard data but don't have the space for a huge server, so instead what I do is keep bare drives around, and make duplicate copies of everything between 3 drives. I use a program called "Virtual Volumes View" to manage where files are stored based on the drive's serial number. I have almost 100 drives of varying capacities that I've set up in this way. If my estimations are correct I'm likely pushing 600-700TB of total possible storage.
Cheap dedis are my drug, and I'm too far gone to turn back.
It's all porn
A lot of media (TV shows/movies/etc.), most of it on YOLORAID (I consider it disposable data), while the more "rare" stuff backed up elsewhere as well (typically to somewhere with RAID1/5/6/9/420). I've had to replace disks for the YOLORAIDs three times overall, which I've taken as a sign that I needed to "purge" anyway.
Though for more important things, I have a tendency to back it up, then never get rid of the older (and no longer needed) backups of said things. I'm pretty sure I can find backups of backups of another backup I did 8 years ago, that I refuse to delete. You know, just in case.
Besides that, I have a fair few DVDs I've acquired over the years that I want to rip. Mostly things that are hard to find online, in my case Norwegian dubs of various cartoons and other shows. Purely for the proper nostalgic experience™, as I grew up with a fair bit of Norwegian dubbed media.
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