except there is a limit because each drive holds a limited amount of data because it is physical media. And you can argue cloud storage but they have a limit as well as price.

With current storage technology, it's almost impossible for physical media size or price to become relevant, the human's ability to add to the collection just can't keep up, unless there are some truly extreme conditions, like they automate the collecting, or insist on uncompressed video.

This is true, but some may not realise the important distinction of "actual stuff you personally archive", not "I downloaded this from somewhere".

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.)

I think most data hoarders aren't technically knowledgeable enough to get that deep into futureproof archival strategies. I suppose priorities are individually different, though. Some might obsess over preservation, others are happy just accumulating stuff without backups, and data loss is a brief pain, quickly forgotten. The key problem of hoarding is the reluctance/inability to deliberately dispose of things.

A new ycomb application; platforms to enable safe data hording.

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!"

The failure of that limit when real world "collecting" is the Hallmark of having a problem hoarding...

Right, my argument is that simply removing the limit doesn't make it "not a problem." You've just removed the common way of telling if it's a problem.

As others have pointed out, time and mental attention become the cost when you remove physical space from the equation.

But if there isn't an issue with it, why stop?

It can consume _a lot_ of time. An mental space. Which is much more precious in life than storage space. Those that get really afflicted by hoarding can have all the issues associated with other forms of addiction. Like not taking care of relationships, work, money - organizing their entre lives around getting their fix. And it can happen very gradually, making it hard to notice wen it has gotten to far, and try to stop.

But parent said what if there is no issue with it. Time and effort are no issue if it's a hobby you enjoy. Quite the opposite. You're probably saying that it can be a slippery slope but that can be said about anything if it turns into unhealthy obsession.

I'm trying to imagine how it can actually take up time. There are so many tools for getting media, watching media, and organizing media that it is basically all automated away at this point. The Media Hoarder metadata thread this week rightfully gave the author crap because he refused to say whether his tool worked with the common organization ways or required you to ruin the organization of your library just to get a few stats.

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.

> I'm trying to imagine how it can actually take up time. There are so many tools for getting media, watching media, and organizing media that it is basically all automated away at this point.

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.