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?

  • cakee_ru@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    I always hope the Pied Piper guy will come and I will be able to fit it all in one hand. One day, one day…

    To answer you - don’t be a martyr of your data. Find a balance. I chose to save everything, but compress the hell out of it. I.e. I save all photos from my phone, but compress them to 1080p and <= 1MB Jpeg. Because I don’t need the tiny details from photos, I just want to keep memories.

  • imzeigen@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    This is my wife. Until we married my wife would even save sms. Would clean everything she hated to have stuff particularly in her phone. It wasn’t until I showed her the benefits of having something like Google photos to easily search for things

    • cosmin_c@alien.top
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      1 year ago

      I was just about to write you can spot them because they use spotify and netflix and other streaming services almost exclusively and if you ask them where that document is they have no clue and retrieve it from Excel’s history.

      • ErynKnight@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        This makes me uneasy. I have colleagues like this. They have 40 open tabs, and none of their desktop icons are even in a grid… With stuff literally overlapping.

        I call these desktops a “Layer 8 collage”.

        • cosmin_c@alien.top
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          1 year ago

          I feel called out on the number of open tabs but hey gotta put that RAM to good use.

          Seriously now, if I’m researching something the number of tabs just explodes to several hundreds. To be in line with the data hoarder principles I do save and organise the data so it’s accessible offline but damn it can become quite annoying to manage at some point.

    • OnceUponCheeseDanish@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      Right before I got into archiving data I was doing my best to get away from technology and needless things that I “rely on” in general.

      Now I’m more reliant on the Internet and technology than ever 🙃

    • devilpants@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      There are a lot of people like this. It’s probably not bad. Less to clutter your mind if it doesn’t bother you.

  • esjay86@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    An ephemerist, someone who enjoys things that are fleeting, temporary, out of sight and out of mind once they’re used.

  • SuperElephantX@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • cosmin_c@alien.top
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      1 year ago

      He straight up told me that he despised his past

      That is so sad :(

      I still have all the memories (photos, etc) and when I open them I feel nothing but gratitude because even if they’re not so happy memories I learned a lot from those experiences. We are all out past, not just what we like. “All sunshine makes a desert” say the arabs and they’re definitely not wrong.

      • KevinCarbonara@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think it’s inherently sad. That is not me by any chance, but I am envious of the experience, in the same way I’m envious of buddhist monks who are happy with nothing.

    • humanclock@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

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

      • Key_Mammoth7084@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        you should delete all your mails today

        it’s one of many methods they profile you online

        google is just another department of cia

      • freedomlinux@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • plg94@alien.topB
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          1 year 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.

      • SuperElephantX@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        You know what? I’ve got these awesome screenshots of some epic online moments with him. We’re talking gameplays, chats, and those hilarious “lol” moments. They’re like treasures to me, so I’m definitely gonna hold onto them and bring them up in conversations every now and then. They make for some great talking points, like a conversation piece of art.

    • vsae@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      And Here I am with 18 TB of selected out photo video storage… And that’s just personal…

  • DocMadCow@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    There sure are and you see it in the video piracy community all the time. You have guys that love giant episodes, and then people download the same episode at the same resolutions that is 1/10 the size! I can’t imagine watching a 200 to 300mb episode of a 44 minute show. Personally I would rather watch something on BluRay most of the time over streaming due to the low quality of so many movies on major streaming providers.

    • alfred725@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      theres usually reasons.

      First, people may still be used to getting charged insane amounts of money for internet bandwidth. Download limits and overage charges are a real problem, especially for phones.

      Download speeds. Downloading a 4k movie can take hours where the 1080p could be a few minutes.

      People may not have a ton of storage space. The choice is between one 4k movie, or ten 1080p movies.

      There’s no need for retention. You’re downloading a movie for yourself, not for archiving. There’s no need for the HD version.

      Tech. If you don’t have a 4k monitor, the 4k resolution is wasted.

      Quality. Just because the file is bigger doesn’t mean it’s higher quality. If the show was produced at 1080p, upscaling it to 4k doesn’t actually increase the quality. I’ve downloaded 4k anime that was upscaled from 1080p and it actually was worse quality because it had a few corrupted artefacts. Corruption on a couple frames throughout the movie because the upscaling wasn’t done perfectly and you wouldn’t catch it unless you sat to watch the whole thing.

      • NavinF@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        If you don’t have a 4k monitor, the 4k resolution is wasted

        This is usually incorrect in practice since 1080p uploads rarely have enough bitrate to match a 1080p monitor. Resolution is not that important, but bitrate is

    • nurseynurseygander@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      I mean, I have shit eyesight and I grew up with videotape then DVDs. Visually sumptuous things like House of the Dragon, yes, I want that in 1080p, I can appreciate the difference enough for that, but 720p seems perfectly serviceable to me for ordinary things. (I have finally tracked down and replaced my very old 480p shows, though).