It might be the case that men are more likely to be collectors/hoarders in general but there definitely are women who partake. I will also say that the type of thing being collected matters. Go to an estate sale for a woman (especially one born before 1960) and you may see collections of dolls, tea services, certain types of paintings, etc.
0, There has been many examples of this on hoarding TV shows and also finance distress aid TV shows (Luksusfellen (NO, DK) Lyxfallan (SE) ).
Okay, I'm a little bit bummed about it.
Her father was a computer hoarder. She never saw a parallel there.
I suppose even DVR platforms such as MythTV recording off of TV would be excluded here, as per your 'automated'... although it's a bit of a grey area, VCRs could be automated, but not really without changing the tape in a home setting.
Another grey area is more detailed "collecting", such as older video/audio, rarer stuff which does often disappear from torrent sites and such. An example being old TV series recorded direct from TV, to tape -> digitized. But even this, with personal intervention at each collection event, fits in terms of it being hard to fill up drives.
Really, preservation is the cost. Primary live/online, along with a RAID method (hardware over software raid typically) capable of per-disk patrol reads and overall raid consistency checks are vital*. Checksums of all files are a requirement too, and an offline secondary server with a full backup synced every so often.
Otherwise bitrot sets in, and you don't know. Either at the disk level, the raid level, or the filesystem level. And that's where the secondary comes in.
Of course, that doesn't help in case of explosions, aliens, or fire. One needs a secondary offsite for that. But my point is, actual real archival isn't simple.
* if you have a raid, even software raid and you're not doing patrol reads and consistency checks regularly, you're not really doing it right. LSI cards tend to require patrol reads and consistency checks set on, and consistency checks schedules (say, Sundays).
And of course if you don't have a script to dump megacli logs to syslog or what not, you don't really know if the raid is having issues. And you don't even know if consistency checks and patrol reads are running.
(In LSI terminology, patrol reads scan entire disks individually, looking for block read errors, and if found, that block is re-written from redundant data in the array. Consistency checks look at the status of the raid, especially checksums of all disks per virtual disk block. Different checks, both required.)
Play on fears of losing everything. How it's too difficult to secure data. How the risks are too high.
It's really no different than convincing people they need all sorts of weird lotions, pills, or gadgets, lest their lives will fall apart, their health decline.
The bonus here is, it's a client base unable to help themselves. Akin to selling medicine to a hypochondriac. I envision entire divisions doing deep-research into clients, with sliding scale cost. The ultra rich hoarder will have their collection stored on the back side of the moon, SpaceX delivered data pots, with solar, redundancy, robotic maintenance, and more.
"My word, it's time to hoard!"
As others have pointed out, time and mental attention become the cost when you remove physical space from the equation.
The only tool I can think of where I feel like I'm wasting time is Calibre. The EBook community really dropped the ball by letting one weird guy and his quirks determine the entire organization of the ecosystem because he wrote a really good conversion tool. Luckily books take up so little space it's fine to copy them into Calibre and duplicate them back to a different organization method.
Thinking that various tools existing means no time or attention is paid to organization anymore seems like a very optimistic view towards those tools. To your point with the Media Hoarder thread, relying solely on a single tool to organize your stuff isn't a common practice, anyway.
I have a NAS with 42TB of capacity at the moment. I'm running about ten web services to present or organize certain types of media. It still takes time to add new media to the appropriate service, and there's still a ton of data that doesn't fit into any of those services and must be organized manually on the filesystem (if it's organized at all).
When I think of "data hoarding," I'm not just talking about scraping torrents for commonly available TV shows into your Plex instance. I'm thinking of any possible data on the internet-- that includes one-off videos from not only YouTube but lots of smaller websites (Vimeo, Dailymotion, Yahoo! Screen, etc), software of various types (OSes, games, miscellaneous apps), images that may or may not be grouped together and may or may not include textual accompaniment, documents that might be in one of half a dozen different formats, etc. And then of course, you also have original content that you create in the course of living, whether that's photo albums from your phone, receipts you scan, or whatever else, which you probably don't want mixed in with other peoples' stuff that you downloaded.
I've effectively given up on collecting DVDs or anything else that takes up too much space, and it's such a load off my mind not having to worry about where to out it all, how to display it, or even how to transport it whenever I move.
It doesn’t have to, but it can. I rate my 8 bay Synology. It’s probably the least cost effective storage option, but it’s a pleasure to use and isn’t too loud as long as it hides in the basement. The options you see on DataHoarder are rather more extreme, and well worse perusing.
I'll probably never bother, but it has saved me the time of organizing it.
(Apple does let me search based on its object classification, and I have searched for tag that came on my apple tree based on a word that appears on it, so I guess that strategy has worked somewhat.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
> Stokes bequeathed her son Michael Metelits the entire tape collection, with no instructions other than to donate it to a charity of his choice. After considering potential recipients, Metelits gave the collection to the Internet Archive one year after Stokes's death. Four shipping containers were required to move the collection to Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco, a move that cost her estate $16,000. It was the largest collection they had ever received. The group agreed to digitize the volumes, a process expected to run fully on round-the-clock volunteers, costing $2 million and taking 20 digitizing machines several years to complete. As of April 2019, the project is still active.
Your comment does remind me of the replicants from Blade Runner and how they need their “precious photos” that aren’t even real as a touchstone to link them to the implanted memories.
be who?
The collection is a /product/ of that time and effort, not the other way around.
People who didn’t do this are someone else
> The collection is a /product/ of that time and effort, not the other way around.
Does the person cease to be if the collection is trashed? Or is the collection just detritus from the process, something that could have been discarded instead of hoarded?
Try it, experience it. It's like walking on grass bare footed.
Is this categorically true? Asking honestly. I’ve thought about it a bit and haven’t come to a firm conclusion. Part of me thinks that human beings are supposed to forget a bit over time. Maybe forgetting is part of helping with mourning and grief, for example.
This, so much this! We should own nothing. Then we'll be happy!
But, with respect to the parent, would it matter if you didn't own them?
What if, say, tools, parts, and books belonged to the land? There for you to use, but if you move to another plot of land you wouldn't take them with you, but instead would have another set of tools, parts, and books waiting for you when you arrive. Would something about that make you less happy?
> Apparently there were so many tapes because the original owner, a now elderly man, had made the recordings for his neighbour.
Really made me chuckle. "hey Billy, can you like, record 500 days of continuous TV program for me that would be great, thanks!"
Likely asked him to record a few shows in the beginning and then the hoarding kicked in? Otherwise I'm wondering why a) the tapes were still at his place and not his neighbor's and b) why he didn't keep taping over the same few tapes. :-)
https://davestrickson.blogspot.com/2020/05/john-peel-session...
The circle has been closed!
You can also download a huge number of shows via the John Peel Wiki [1] and look out for Phil's Mighty Database. There's also a torrent out there, a huge archive of Peel shows known as The Motherlode, well worth nabbing.
I will one day be inheriting this lot, and have no damned idea what I’m going to do with them.
If and when it’s a relevant problem for me I’ll go through his catalogue, digitise anything worthwhile, and then dispose of the lot, be it through sale as recordable media (they should all be in great shape, as he stores them well) or otherwise.
The thing about archives is that it's never clear what will turn out to be important or valuable. You're buying and storing a pile of lottery tickets. Yes, they're probably worthless. But only probably.
I suspect a lot of people's thinking is informed by the long saga of missing Doctor Who episodes, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-televisi...
The impression I get is that if I want something to continue existing, it's my responsibility to make that happen.
On a darker note, this appears to be true of civilization in general...
If a domain gets parked and someone adds a robots.txt that disallows all, past versions become unavailable in most cases. Very annoying.
Me - I'm on the JellyFin bandwagon. This is less to archive everything (I have MDISC for the important stuff like my personal photos and documents and such) and more to just have my own streaming service type thing which works when the internet is down.
https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-wireless/products/li...
for the 70 ft or so gap between the houses. Over several months I played games and watched Jellyfin, Tubi and Apple TV but didn't watch a single disk. The move freed up a lot of space in the main house so I donated of about 2/3 of the discs (not going to watch Disney's Frozen again but it was hard to decide which cut of Superman II I wanted) to the reuse center.
I got Bob B to eat treats with relish in the other house but once I moved him to the farmhouse he wedged himself into a corner and refused to acknowledge our other cats when they came around to greet him politely. He made a break for it the first chance he got although my wife has seen him lurking around our barn.
I met a bloke once in the 90's who made recordings on to C-90 tapes of anything interesting that was on BBC Radio 4 and 3, and he found most things interesting. He was surrounded by piles, thousands of tapes everywhere and he was desperately trying to catalog everything. As I spoke to him he was listening to the radio via an ear bud, whilst also recording the radio. He was supposed to be moving out of his house that day, having just exchanged contacts, but he was drowning in his precious tapes. His wife seemed pretty p**d off with him.
I was a bit compulsive myself. I used to buy records, then CDs, and I also made tapes of albums, and recordings of the John Peel show. It was a problem to shift 100s of records and CDs and boxes of tapes whenever I moved house. I lightened my load by giving everything away apart from the Peel tapes which were the most entertaining items in the whole collection, it actually felt good. I kept hold of the Peel tapes for some years, even though my tape deck had died. There were some great shows from the 90s! But then I had to downsize again so I took them to the rubbish tip, even that didn't make me sad.
Ultimately, having and keeping stuff just weighs you down.