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?
A Marie Kondo script.
Yeah, the ‘you own nothing and you will be happy’ people.
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 🙃
There are a lot of people like this. It’s probably not bad. Less to clutter your mind if it doesn’t bother you.
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.
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”.
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.
My whife has similar issues with her photos. She has hundreds of thousands. She takes thirty photos of everything “so she can get the right shot,” but can never find the time to sort through them. She keeps running out of space on her phone’s msd card, and just getting a new one and putting the old one away. She six terrabites of mostly photos on my desktop (I gave hear a hard drive in it so she could use it for Photoshop) and none of it is organized.
I can only give you the same advice I give her: you need to curate, and that means you need a system. A good system/protocol/routine should allow you to keep your data sorted and organized, and I strongly suspect that once you know exactly what you have and where it is, you’ll feel a lot better.
If your concern is storage, if you are not consciously data hoarding (in other words, you’re not going out and looking for entire runs of magazines, TV shows etc.); a good curation system will ensure that while yes, your data collection may continue to grow consistently, I doubt very much that it will grow at a rate that makes it unfeasible to manage.
If I might make a suggestion to begin with: /r/datacurator
A Virgin.
people who use streaming
I’d use a term like ‘non-collector’ which I work with a lot of people who just go home and watch streaming services, some even play videogames on subscription services like Xbox Game Pass and don’t actually buy anything to own. At all.
They spend their money on food and travel, and don’t collect anything. I guess that’s the opposite of us?
Wouldn’t that be most people? Casually consuming media and just downloading onto their one laptop every once in a while.
It’s called Yahoo.com. Every archivist on the Internet gets Vietnam War flashbacks whenever one of their websites shows up in the news.
The data minimalist is going to be so bored when the zombie apocalypse/crash of the economy/Mad Maxx in real life starts and they don’t have a PB of TV Shows and movies to keep them entertained over the next 80-100 years. Lol
You should rest easy then knowing that at any moment the drive could break and lose everything. It will delete stuff for you.
I am not sure whether there’s an official term for it (though dataphobe comes to mind, but it seems a little off), but there are a lot of minimalists when it comes to data. Probably the kinds of people that handle info that are sensitive and has to be purged frequently. Well, that or the person doesn;t really care about the files and only keeps what s/he needs.
As much as it’s a goal of mine to hoard, I kinda do not have as huge as the storages of the other people here, but I tend to keep free indie games I could find, even demos sometimes, and some obscure alternative software for certain paid apps. Usual reason for the hoard is for offline use; I do not want a cloud-only environment.
I use TailsOS as my daily driver, with persistent storage disabled.
DataPurger. I like to save the meaningful/useful stuff, but I don’t keep everything for the sake of it. I try to have an efficient workflow during content creation, and purge the unwanted stuff straight away.
I’m 72, I would have loved the convenience of photos that we have today. Have some photos of youth, but cameras, film, developing, cost, etc was a pain. And even then quality of photos weren’t that great.
A Buddhist. Everything is in a state of impermanence.