Prompted by a recent post, I asked myself: is collecting digital media really considered hoarding?
From this Tildes post https://tildes.net/~music/7vc/anyone_still_listening_to_music_with_files_instead_of_streaming
I started thinking. To me, curating my own collections so that I can experience them only makes common sense. And I also journal on what I read, watch, and listen to. I've known a few hoarders in my life, who enlarge their homes to house tons of material things that they'll never use and can't throw away.
In my own case, I'm slowly winnowing down the hundred or so CD's, books, and movies I own just because they take up space and I don't want my kids having to have a massive garage sale when I die. And I really like that I can have a whole library basically on an old phone that holds an SDHC card.
So is obsession/compulsion with digital media the same as physical hoarding? Is it just as harmful? And how do I class the tons of emails, mostly work, that I don't bother to throw away because it's just too time consuming? The same thing goes for family and self snapped photos. To me they're in a different category altogether.
Am I the biggest, most hypocritical minimalist ever? Is there such a thing as non-material materialism? What are your justifications for or against streaming vs. accumulating?
I like to keep my digital collection well organised but you sound like you may know more than a few things about organising media and I'd love to know if there's anything specific that you would emphasize! I only have around 4-5 Terabytes of data but I'd love to start early and make sure everything's neat and tidy.
For organizing movies and TV, check out FileBot. If you want to get fancy, I believe you can totally automate it. As with any renamer, you can specify the fields you want. I use
Movie Title (Year, Director)-- if I've muxed in a commentary, I'll add- Commentaryafter the year.For music, I use Foobar2000 sort everything, assuming your ID3 tags are proper. For those using the DUI with Foobar2000, TagBox is an excellent panel that can be added to the interface for quick tag editing.
For music and audiobooks, there are plenty of other sorting applications, but I've always found Foobar2000 to be the best (even in WINE.)
For all books themselves, Calibre is the way to go. I believe you can also use the Calibre content server with a Kindle, but I haven't tried this.
If your NAS is setup with JBOD and has multiple drives with multiple content folders (e.g. TV on two drives), you can add multiple sources per item in Kodi, which is really handy.
You're most likely doing most, if not all of this -- but I figured I'd chime in anyway just to be sure.
I went with a Synology DS-1815, stuffed 8 4TB WD Reds into it, and figured there was no way in hell I'd be able to fill up a ~26TB filesystem no matter how much media I consumed. It's got about 1.5TB free today. When it gets down to around 500GB I purge a few shows I know I won't bother watching again to make room for new stuff. Someday I'll replace it with something SSD-based once 8TB SSDs are price-competitive. That'll certainly make searching the files easier. :P
Mentally, I guess there's a lot of crossover. I'm at about 7 TB and I've certainly paused on a file while scrolling and thought "mm, maybe I'll want this later". Admittedly, that's definitely a borderline-hoarder attitude.
But whether or not it's a mental equivalent... as koan and hungariantoast said, it's not physically harmful, so I really don't consider it to be. Mental weight is certainly a thing, but with digital items, the line at which it becomes a harmful compulsion is a lot higher.
The only actual problem I've found -- and I started ripping movies and TV shows in 2003, so this is partly a consequence of starting to get kinda old -- is when I go to play a file and it's some crazy old 500 MB WMV thing from fifteen years ago. At this point I've just been going through and trying to find a lot of old favorites as 4K HDR files... so that they can then be super-outdated in another fifteen years.
Have you noticed lately that some of the older videos have been ridiculously upgraded in quality? We were watching Lost in Space (the tv series, season 1) on Roku the other day and it came off as some of the best HD I've ever seen, and in black and white. To the point you could see the drops of sweat on the characters.
I have a bit of a different take on this topic.
In a general sense, I tend to favor a more positive rather than negative view to data "hoarding." I am fortunate enough to have been able to build a 42TB freeNAS server to help facilitate this. However my perspective tends to favor "hoarding" for specific reasons, and if I can be so bold, I'd like to quote /r/datahoarder's side bar:
I make it a point to download high quality YouTube videos (entire channels, even) for instance because of the disgusting prevalence of horseshit DMCA copyright claims, e.g, everything in this thread. A user within this very thread raises another very important point:
Very good point. Then there are all the books my library throws out every day. Some of those were my old favorites, and are out of print! But I can't curate a whole library.
To me this brings back the dark ages of my youth, when we would see movies at the theater three times in a row, to drill them into our brains. We knew once they left the cinema that our access was usually gone, forever.
I have mixed views on this. I do know people who download stuff "because they can" and have so much to watch, read, listen to that it would take a lifetime of constant consumption. That's hoarding, in my view. Having a big, curated collection of content is not though. It's more akin to a home library if you're actively managing what is kept and what isn't.
You may find this recent article interesting
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/09/cyberchondria-and-cyberhoarding-is-internet-fuelling-new-conditions
Thanks I'll check it out!
To build off of what others have said, especially rez, I think the key dinstinction would likely be the mental state associated with the behavior.
If your media gathering has harmful effects, such as taking time that should be used elsewhere, or money you cannot afford to spend, it may indeed be a harmful behavior. Additionally, if your media gathering is complusive and is not accompanied by some level of organization, it may be worth examining the motives behind it.
Hoarding typically isn't an issue because the person acquires items, but instead because they acquire items of no value, beyond what they reasonably need and can store, and do so to the detriment of their health. If someone has unlimited space, and keeps items neatly stored, and doesn't collect in ways harmful to their well-being, they are more likely to be termed a collector than a hoarder.
For the sake of disclosure, I have ~20TB of storage composed of a variety of media and the personal documents of friends and family.
Your comments make me think about how smokers collect residue in their lungs. Just an analogy, interesting to ponder. We all have our personal self harms. Are we entitled to them if we are only harming ourselves? I remember in my Dad's last days, he had Alzheimer's and took up smoking again. He loved cigarettes, even though he couldn't remember smoking them, just the nicotine effect afterward. He was at a retirement center and they only let him smoke outside with the other smokers. I would buy him cigarettes, even though my mother died from emphysema in her '70s. I couldn't refuse him this one last pleasure. I'm reminded of a line from Linus in Charlie Brown - 'Would you give a starving dog a rubber bone?' speaking of his blanket, replaced by a towel.
I'm the guy that brought up the term hoarding in that thread, it was a metaphorical use in my case. It's hard for digital hoarding to be as harmful as hoarding itself. For me, it's generally about backups and moving data around. Ideally I'd keep the most essential stuff under 16GB (should be around ~5-6GB these days).
Many here talk about TBs and lots of media files, probably video files, probably containing movies and TV stuff. I think that goes a bit into hoarding territory, because most of those videos will be available elsewhere and there is not much need to hold on to most of them. Personally, I don't watch a lot of movies, but when I do, I don't keep the file around after watching it. Sure, storage is cheap (except not really, $200 is almost four fifths of the minimum wage where I live), but bandwidth is quite cheap too.
All great observations. Yes, digital media is a metaphysical topic the Greeks didn't discuss much, I think. It's real in one sense, but its sheer volume works like storage in infinite space, making it as someone else observed, a hybrid object, capable of being invisible when we can't find it among everything else.
Interestingly, Jorge Luis Borges deals with this in his fictions. Most know about the Library of Babel, but also he deals with small objects that seem to appear and disappear in Tlon, Orbis Tertius. He calls these objects hronir. I find this akin to remote controls and flash drives and keys, even car keys, that 'go missing' once in awhile. I remember we searched high and low for a lost remote for about a year. Then it magically dropped out of our recliner, even though we'd searched there many times.
I think my own growing pile of (uncurated) files began with seeing how others never bothered curating their email, which is where I started. I treat it more or less like an IRS labeled file, just going back every several years and trashing the oldest.
I depends on how you store and classify your files. I've had two laptops in the last 6 years, and swapped the hdd to an ssd, then changed the ssd when it failed. Every time my policy was just to copy everything over to an external hard drive, don't want to loose anything. But really, I need maybe 10% of those files. Spread out over 2 external drives and a myriad of folders tucked away behind obscure names — it's effectively lost. Actually trying to find a file is such a pain that I just leave it, over the years the pile just keeps on growing, completely useless and yet difficult to get rid of, because what if I might need it some day.
Ony my new laptop I have got a strict policy of removing anything once I am finished with it, be it a program or downloaded file etc.
That's a good practice. With my professional files, everything is categorized by year, and that works pretty good.