>>I honestly have no idea how someone collects 4 TB of data that is worthy enough to back up.

All data is worthy of Backup. I have about 40TB of Home Storage that is backup;ed on a set of encrypted disks offline. (Total RAW Capacity of all my storage in my home lab last a checked was about 150TB)

I do not go Full 3-2-1 with it, but I do have a duplicate copy of all my data with about 2TB in a Full 3-2-1 Backup, I would say about 750GB to 1TB has 1 copy of the 3-2-1 in a "cloud" vendor of some kind

I am certainly a digital pack rat. Luckily, unlike physical pack rats, our data doesn't take up a lot of room, and since storage capacity keeps increasing so rapidly, I have never had to delete anything.

Here are some of the things that I have that add up to my multiple TBs of data I want to keep around.

First, I have every single school assignment from growing up (30+ years ago, so it doesn't take up much space). These are kind of fun to have. I can show my kids the papers I wrote when I was their age.

A lot of old converted 8mm tapes from when I was a kid. I used to be really into making claymation videos, so I have hours of videos that I converted around 15 years ago into digital formats. I could probably reconvert them to a more modern codec that would take up less space, but they are still multiple hours. Currently takes up around 100 gigs.

Every digital photo I have ever taken. Over 20 years, this is a lot of photos. A few hundred gigs there.

Tons of videos of my daughter. A hundred gigs there, growing all the time. Maybe I take too many, but it is really fun looking back and remembering when she was little.

Every programming project I ever created, going back 25 years. Fun to see my progression. Not a ton of space, but many gigs worth.

A ton of old games that don't exist to download. Old shareware, commercial games, etc. I created CD images for the all the ones I had on physical media, so I don't have to lug around the CDs anymore. I like to be able to play games I played years ago every now and then. This takes up a good chunk, and is probably a few hundred gigs.

Ripped DVD movies and TV shows. Bought many over the years, and don't want to have to find and/or rip them again if I lose the data. This is hundreds of gigs.

Countless other minor things (saved games, documents, etc).

I like all of these things. If I have a house fire, I like knowing I wouldn't lose all of that. Since it is so cheap to maintain a backup of it, why not? Yeah, I wouldn't be DEVASTATED if I lost all my old DVD rips, but for 60 bucks a year (and that is the same cost whether I back those up or not), why not keep them backed up?

Thank you for sharing! I probably have the same thing split over a few hard drives, it was a bit hypocritical of me to criticize, I apologize.

You're right, the private data that I choose to preserve is objectively worthless. I shall relay your findings to my family.

"Sorry, Mom, I can't help you watch that Mork and Mindy collection on your bedroom-TV Roku. Someone On the Internet informed me that my digital collections are not worthy of keeping, and I dutifully deleted them."

"No, sweetie, we absolutely cannot share your childhood with our daughter and watch my digital rip of Fraggle Rock. Good parents delete their abhorrent digital media and pay HBO Go $15/month for the privilege of viewing it!"

"What are you thinking, keeping those hundreds of CD's and Vinyl's we ripped together on your iPhone, Dad? You can chuck all that crap that we actually own and pay a monthly fee to Spotify for the privilege of streaming it! Unless, of course, the publisher decides to pull their collection off of Spotify, for whatever reason."

"Hey, guys, now that we're all moved out of the house, we need to talk about the Nintendo 64. Mom and Dad bought it for all of us, so I think it's only fair that we keep the physical console at their place so that no one of us will have exclusive access to it. As for the games, I think each of us should be allowed to take the cartridges with us that we individually paid for and/or receives as gifts. So that'll be me taking Super Mario 64, Majora's Mask, Super Smash Bros, Star Fox 64, and NBA: Hangtime; Steve takes Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, Perfect Dark, and Donkey Kong 64; and Fred takes Mario Party, Pokemon Stadium, Mario Kart, and Banjo Kazooie. Yeah, I know, I do wish there were some kind of legal backup method that might let us all enjoy the games we collectively owned. Oh well. Maybe Nintendo will release an N64 Classic and we can each pay $80 to play the games we already paid for. Assuming the games we own appear on the collection."

I think the idea is that if it is possible / easy to re-obtain the media, then you don't need to back it up (i.e., if it was obtained via bittorrent).

A second classification is data that isn't changing -- you can create a couple backups of that media, store one in a bank safe deposit box, maybe ship another backup to a family member across the country.

Then you have recent acquisitions and ongoing projects -- those are what you would sync daily to an online backup service. So you still have offsite backup of everything, but by splitting up the categories, you end up not needing to sync that much online.

Username checks out.

I'm a hobbyist photographer who gets to shoot significantly about 4-5 weeks per year. In each such week, I typically shoot 2,500 - 3,500 images. My current DSLR camera produces images that are in the range of 50MB each. That means about 125 - 175 GB / week of shooting. I currently have about 1.5TB of image data backed up in the cloud. And I don't shoot video at all.

By comparison to some of the more serious amateur photographers that I often travel with, I don't shoot a lot. They may shoot 10,000 images in a week.

I know a person who has 6 TB of own photo and video. This accumulated through 8 years of documenting various activism-related events. And the photos take a substantial part of that. On a good camera high-quality JPEG is 10MB or more, so just by taking 100 pictures (normal amount if one wants to seriously document an event, not own perception of it) one needs 1GB to store them.