It can become a compulsion to record and collect media. Seems like a male thing, normally it's blokes who create these archives.
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.
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.
Yup. See also, the massive underdiagnosis of autism in women, especially ‘attractive’ women (I shit you not!). We’re only just now beginning to clear up decades and decades of brushing things off as ‘quirky girl’ traits. Everyone has a grandparent that obsessed over collecting something or other. It’s really just a question of how incidentally racist the collection is :).
I know a lady hoarder. She would buy lots and lots of thrift shop stuff, some to just have and appreciate, some to use as raw materials for artsy projects.
Her father was a computer hoarder. She never saw a parallel there.
Lonely women are also found to be hoarding trinkets and plastic furniture for a home they don't have and for a family and or relationship they dont have - but hope or think will come in the future.[0]
0, There has been many examples of this on hoarding TV shows and also finance distress aid TV shows (Luksusfellen (NO, DK) Lyxfallan (SE) ).
I think it's fairly common that people keep/collect/hoard stuff against a future lifestyle that they eventually realize that they don't even want. When my dad was clearing out a former house for an estate sale, I definitely took too much stuff against a day when I would have formal dinner parties like my parents did--but, of course, never did.
I sadly collected retro computers for when I was going to play them with my old pals. Guess which machines are just collecting dust, after I paid high prices for them. Instead of sadness I just accept it as reality and move on. We have bigger things to do. And of course in my case, for this case, anything old can be emulated and give the same on-screen experience.
So this is the "having stuff weighs you down thread", I guess tomorrow something people like will get deleted off streaming services and we'll have the "owning physical media is The Way" thread.
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.
I think archive.org holds onto copies of websites, even if they're no longer accusable on the wayback machine, as long as they don't get a direct deletion request.
If a domain gets parked and someone adds a robots.txt that disallows all, past versions become unavailable in most cases. Very annoying.
I only started to really appreciate having a web page archive after cataloging the coffee I drank, which often have pages full of detail about the beans until they sell out and then, poof!, they’re taken offline.
I find it interesting to think about this while listening to historical content like the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Tl;dr, if you want something to survive for millennia, it needs to be carved in stone or you need to arrange for monks to keep transcribing it
A storyied ephemera shop "plan b",Halifax,ns was closing,and a 3/4" brodcast vhs machine was gifted to me,and much latter upon investigation revealed
a tape inside,with "Doctor Who" and an episode
that is too blurred to read
Also have an ancient steel wire recorder with a role of wire,and going back even further a pair of
wax drum dictaphone recorders with drums
there are of course ,truely monsterous collections
out there lurking with the epic storys known to
just a few or perhaps only one disinterested guardian/custodian,and these will keep cropping up
for centuries
new motszart piece popped up recently was sitting
on a shelf safe and sound for all this time
My Observation: If the item is kept long enough, just about EVERYTHING becomes valuable. (I guess that's because other similar items are lost or destroyed over time )
> 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.
The outwardly visible status is that just a small portion of the recordings have been made available[1]. The Archive is not commenting about this for years now.
I've donated to archival efforts before and, as many, would be happy to chip in for this one. It doesn't seem possible though and we don't know why it appears stalled.
I already do, I have donated $1750 so far. I have no way to see why this project is stalled or to specify where my donations go to (which makes sense, having donators specifying which subproject is likely to be a nightmare to manage)
My godfather has about 50,000 VHS tapes of TV recordings - all catalogued and neatly stored in huge pull-out racks that ⅔ of his three bedroom apartment (he’s single) are dedicated to. He wrote a cataloguing system in qbasic, having never coded before - these days he’s got a web app.
I will one day be inheriting this lot, and have no damned idea what I’m going to do with them.
It’s collections like this that sometimes turn out to have the only surviving copy of the Apollo moon landing broadcast. I would digitize the report of what is in there and make it available on the Internet as fast as possible, so that people who are interested in this stuff can see if there’s anything that is not available elsewhere
Yeah, this is my likely approach - it’s not impossible he’s got some BBC stuff that’s otherwise lost, as he pretty much ran two VCRs continuously for a quarter of a century, from the early 80’s to early 10’s - but it’s mostly just hoarding.
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.
I recommend contacting the local retro computer or cinephile (or generic "geek') scene and see if you can recruit volunteers to digitize them for you. I would volunteer for this, take a crate home and pop in tapes while I go about my normal day.
That's a colossal number of tapes. The few I found that had been stored in boxes since the 80s had mould on them, hopefully the collection doesn't have mould.
Good luck finding someone who will pay you $50K for cash and carry. The problem with a lot of old stuff is that it has value to someone. But finding that someone who will take it off your hands without much friction isn't easy.
I went to a talk once from a man who collected antique magic props. He said when he moved he needed a 1 ton container for his stuff. At the end of the talk, someone asked if his wife objected to his collection. He said "She doesn't complain about my magic stuff, and I don't complain about her Teddy Bears."
At least the tendency seems more pronounced in men, but that might just be perception. Anyways:
> 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. :-)
That's awesome, what a treasure trove :-) thanks for sharing.
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.
Thankfully my semi-hoarding of digital media takes up no space aside from on my server's hard drives and organizing is easy and pleasant. I definitely feel the pull to add to the collection. It's a sort of joy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, my 30TB of digital media fits in a shoebox and even doubling that would still fit in the same shoebox. It's also not something that takes up a lot of time unless you let it take over your life. Maybe a few hours a week of gathering new media (movies, shows, games, YouTube videos, etc.), then I move on with my life and do other things.
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.
I keep my DVDs on those spindles that recordable discs come on. I take the paper and the disc, and throw out the case unless it's a really special one.
Yeah, the correct answer is to basically chuck it all. If you have a bit of possibly unique content, perhaps contact a relevant archive (which I did recently) but otherwise accept that you don't need to find a home for everything. Books, DVDs, and CDs can go to your local library's book sale though most will end up pulped. VHSs are mostly just trash at this point even if someone, somewhere might want them.
> Luckily, hoarding digital media is a lot easier and doesn't take up much space.
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 used to collect many things, also on my pc in digital forms. then oneday my hard-drive just straigh-up died, no backups ofcourse the smart teenager i was. I was super sad, for like 1 hour, and re-installed and started 'clean'. That really felt like a big relief, and i got rid of all of my collections of useless stuff. loads of old pcs, laptops, tapes, cds, whatever. Ended up at somepoint only having a desktop, some speakers and a bed. now i have a little more again, but no collections, i just throw everything that's not usable to me anymore, or give it away if it might be usable to someone. feels great not having so much clutter and stuff around me anymore. real easy to clean the house too now :D
Whenever I upgrade computers, I never transfer, just start fresh. I keep old hard drives around and have backups in case I need stuff but... all that stuff I accumulate I don't actually need.
For a while I was trying to gentle a feral cat in a room in my other house (rental property under renovation), I moved the XBOX and all my DVD/Blu-Ray discs there (unlike books, I'm not afraid of having any of these get sprayed on) -- for a weeks the house was a SCIF but pretty soon I set up one of these
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.
A friend of mine (Japanese - relevant because the cost of music CD's was higher there) in high school would have side jobs so he could buy music. His mom - possibly undiagnosed mental health issues - every few years would throw away his CD collection which he'd spent the equivalent of 30-40k USD on. This happened twice.
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.
That's been my strategy with photos for the last couple of decades. I don't bother organizing them, figuring ML/image classification will do the trick eventually.
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.)
What's the purpose of going to the extreme of having no stuff, anyway? I like to have a collection of tools and parts as well as a collection of books. As a child, I could find books in our collection at home, and when visiting friends with a book collection, I like to browse it and ask about some of the books. I have and use an e-reader, but the reading experience is a little worse and browsing is much worse.
> I like to have a collection of tools and parts as well as a collection of books.
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?
Not owning would not make much difference, but selection does. The tools are for the things that I like to do, and for the books, selection is even more important becase there are so many to choose from and so relatively few that are "mine".
Generally it’s more about earthly possessions that we should not have too much of but from that to nothing is a bit of a stretch. I want to own a few personal things but not enough to produce physical or psychological clutter
Why the BBC? It should go to archives like archive.org and publicly accessible "pirate" archives, so corporations like the BBC can't stick it in a vault and bury it.
Your assuming that the archival format would be the same or that there's not anything else specific for their needs. Everybody thinks their snowflake is special, and definitely more special than anyone else's snowflake.
You're assuming that people can't get along. Is there some reason the BBC and archive.org can't work together to satisfy both of their wants and needs?
I like the sentiment but I think most people I know would be better off freed from their hoarded items and actually able to be somebody.
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.
What makes you think people are burdened by their belongings? I'm not talking about heavy hoarders. Having things and photos are actually good for your soul. You go to a trip for one month, take photos, sometimes rewatching them helps them bring you back the good memories.
Try it, experience it. It's like walking on grass bare footed.
> Having things and photos are actually good for your soul. You go to a trip for one month, take photos, sometimes rewatching them helps them bring you back the good memories.
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.
I can't tell if this is facetious or not, but be the person that they are. The whole rest of the person besides the obsession. Maybe with some extra freedom and time they can build up their other interests and relationships. Grandfather comment or so said the guys wife was upset with him. Without the piles of tapes he could replace "tape guy" with "happier relationship" and "successfully moved". Literally everything else about the person is who they are. Narrowing a persons whole identity down to a collection of objects is a neurotic and reductive take on personhood, in my opinion
> The person who they are is the one who spent the time and effort to collect them.
> 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?
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.