Data Hoarder

I see both sides of your experience as valid. On the one hand, as a person who admittedly can be cluttered in real life, there’s something therapeutic and empowering about taming a digital collection into something logical and structured, often to a level of detail others might call me crazy for.

At the same time, it’s gotta be a healthy mix for me, between cataloging and actually enjoying the collection. I look at a perfectly catalogued data set of any sort as a long-term goal, but try to keep it from ever being too time-consuming all at once

What? GET OUUUUT!

I kid, I like putting things in there places it is sleek easy and professional when you need something in a time sensitive matter.

Hard disagree. If you have fun in any aspects of a hobby, it's never a 'waste of life', even if some might find that part boring.

You think you are wasting your time and not enjoying what you are doing. Sounds like a personal problem. I bet many people here enjoy a nice and tidy collection. Whether it is a waste of time is up for debate, but what good is your collection that you say you are going to continue to add to, if you can't find anything in it?

I am happy about your change op, meantime if others feels pointless in Their sorting fun, please try to find community. We have all type of members - dragons which have huge space and keeps it online, ants enjoying working on data sets to keep them tidy and neat and bees adding new stuff for ants to work on!

Well don’t get too lazy. For media I do almost nothing except rename titles in Plex and fix issues as I see them. I transcode automatically with tdarr but if it fails on a file I don’t look into it. I’m pretty lazy and disorganized so having tools like radarr is nice. The bad part about me being lazy and disorganized is I tend to not organize my personal files.

I just spent 8 hours today moving my own data around structuring it in a way that hopefully makes sense. I have probably another 3 weekends of reorganization to do. I build my server years ago to store all my own data but because it was so disorganized it I basically just gave up besides setting up backups for my devices. I didn’t bother to collect all the data from the previous hard-drives that I used for backups and media storage. I do photography and videography as a hobby so I have a few of 4TB HDD filled with just my own footage. None of it’s backed up and it’s getting to that point that the disks will start failing if I don’t get organized and back stuff up appropriately.

My plan right now is to build a good foundation. Bring everything in just so I can see how much storage I need to build a second server to actually back it all up correctly. I estimate I have 15 TB of data across all the drives but I’m sure there is duplicates somewhere. Manually going through it all is going to be a PITA. I wish I had done a better job of keeping up with it over the years.

I spent like half a work day maybe 4 hours or so ensuring my collection of all the Futurama episodes were in order of production which I opted in for because its not really super serialized and it all turned out well, I then separated I believe season 4, 5 and 3 because season 5 was mostly produced for season 4 but some episodes were produced for season 3, then I spent the entire time watching it putting each episode into a tier list of about 7 categories ranging from best to worst with inbetween-ey emotions supplementing the other tiers, I still include a file for season 5 because it technically does exist but it really shouldn't if we are going by my production date system.

I also watched every Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode and separated all episodes which were unsuitable for my girlfriend into a separate folder which I put on a USB drive because I wanted to share with her something from my childhood even though she couldn't watch a majority of the episodes (Blood makes her faint and needles and alot of the hyperviolent gags in that show. She loves meatwad though)

I plan on doing the same tier list thing I did for Futurama but for Adventure Time(I expect a lot of heavy hitters) and maybe Steven Universe(I expect as much disappointment as when I first watched this show.), in short: I like making lists and compiling information.

Learn to code and automate all the renaming, transcoding and cataloguing. In the long way you save time with that.

This is me exactly. I love organizing my media, and idon't think it's a waste of my time. It's like people who enjoy gaming, or doing puzzles, just doing what they enjoy. It also helps with OCD.

I recognize this. What I find myself doing is that I also enjoy doing the docker compose and setup/operation instead of actually using the application.

Life is to short worring about having the wrong kind of fun experience.

I figure we’ll have Ai agents to organise files in 10 years

I'll listen to a ripped Libby book while I catalog the other thousand

Counter-PSA: Life is short. If you enjoy obsessively catalogueing your data collections, go right ahead. People of the future will probably appreciate it.

Regards,

A person who dislikes cataloguing things

Yeah I think that might be the case for all of us. The data hoarding part is the enjoyable part. The dopamine hit from providing someone with files that have been scrubbed from the public internet is something no drug could ever match.

I've had the same thoughts many times. It is a never-ending work in progress.

Problem #1: I like too much, but I will never have enough time to watch/read/play/listen to it all in my lifetime. I need to be more selective with the content and keep only what I love and start deleting the average/OK stuff.

Problem #2: Most of the re-encoding done is because of a constant struggle with HD space.

I will keep organizing and tidying (sometimes it's relaxing and fun), but I will try to do the bare minimum just so that I'm able to find stuff again and not have it too messy. I need to spend the time enjoying the content rather than just organizing forever.

I'm obsessed with organising the data in my system. I just can't navigate without it. It's one of the best practices. I love cataloguing all the data.

And here's the thing, i absolutely hate it when people don't have a proper organisation in their system. I've seen people with random shit in their downloads folder and they have no idea what's that junk. I could never live like that. They just drop anything, anywhere without any problem.

I'm so obsessed that I even categorise my browser tabs and bookmarks too. I simply can't live without it. It's amazing.

Also, side note. It could be completely coincidental but the most unorganised people are usually Mac users. They always have absolutely random and countless shit on their system. It's not like Windows users are any better with stupid level of desktop shortcuts but, Mac users are crazy on another level.

Found the alistic

Absolutely agree with you.

I've rebuilt my collection 4x so far in the last 15 years. 1000+ titles each time. 2 were due to hardware failure, one was ransomware, and last current rebuild is due to losing access to gsuite drive.

My current thinking is "f this". Paying for the streaming platforms is enough to satisfy my media consumption. At this age and stage in life, I barely have time to watch anything anyways. YouTube is my go to and I ended up paying for premium.

Joke's on you, I'm already committed

But I do it for fun, scrambling through my Data organizing it here and there.

Do what I did. Get a boyfriend to do it, get him addicted to cataloguing and have him waste his life so you're free to do more shopping for Blu-rays... To rip.

I've realized this recently too

Your stuff isn't being organized and titled properly automatically?

I have sonarr and radarr naming things exactly how I want them.

Ok - you sound a bit depressed. I get it.

There is a part of you that is shaming you for 'not being productive'. I have this as well.

You have to realize that there is another part of you that likes TV, movies, sex, games, hanging out with friends and video games.

All of these activities are a "waste of time" to the part of you that is torturing you.

But - there is another part of you that enjoys your cataloging. It is calming and relaxing. You get a sense of satisfaction putting things in order. It gives you some control in a world that is un-certain.

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Question: Have you ever gone to the gym or had a trainer? They will make you exercise parts of your body that you normally do not use. This is to prevent atrophy of these less used parts.

Your hobbies and "Data Hording" is similar. You are organizing, working with the computer, deciding how to solve problems and interacting with us here.

Like exercising strange muscles - you are working things that are not really 'productive' or useful. But like the gym - it helps to do these tasks to keep yourself whole.

The one trick - time box how much time you spend. An hour in front of the computer - then an hour cleaning the room, kitchen, grocery shopping, etc.

Be aware of your balance.

Try to forgive yourself. Look at "stamp collecting" - you never 'finish' or use the stamps to mail things. The researching, collecting, organizing, cataloging etc. are all important parts of the hobby.

I also rarely read/watch the things I collect. But I love fixing problems, writing scripts to rename things, coming up with a 'workflow', etc. My mind is always active, I seek out "...how do you guys solve this problem?" posts here.

It's not the destination that is important, it's the journey. And sharing problems and solutions.

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So let me ask: what was the last annoying problem you solved cataloging your collection? Is your solution more clever than mine?

Mine's tidy but not overly tidy. For example, I don't rename every file. I have a folder called "TV shows live action" and folders inside that are the name of the show and years aired. Every season is one zip file as store compression.

I think this is reasonable and cuts down on clutter. I used to obsessively rename files in the past and it wasn't worth the trouble.

Go ahead and add this to your collection >!/s!<

More seriously though, I've thought about all the duplicated/overlapping work everyone here must be doing and wished there was a way for everyone to contribute to a central archive so the indexing/labeling/etc excessive manual labor components could be distributed without running into the copyright issues of sharing those files.

You don’t need to have a nervous breakdown when you’ve grown tired of a hobby. Pick a new one

Thanks, tho I'll do whatever I want.

On the whole I agree with your point.

I was keeping a lot of media that Id never watch again because it was crap. Then I realised why keep it? I have no duty to provide it to others and don't need to repeat view.

Secondly, I found that my photo collection has thousands (literally of duplicates). Using python heading out was very easy to clean this out. I suffered some paranoia before automatically deleting the files but came to the conclusion that deleting by hand was not an option.

Finally, I think I've got a collection larger than I need (ie a hoard). I don't see it as a problem but my growth rate has slowed as I prioritise other things rather than collecting. I agree with your sentiment that there's better things to do than meta data curating but who am I to judge :)

Well I've been looking for way to save everything in offline mode only stuff you want, and I came across this group just, I spotted your article here and it's made me think well why not...

Create a community driven nostalgic looking frontend that is categorised for eg. save sites to text and save sites to text with images/ save pdf/save video/save iso etcetc so you basically havwe a bridge to the web through this frontend it's own simple browser that can extract and download the content for offline frontend use cases with the format of your choice then you could have shares on a website or server of these builds people have made with the mb/gb/tb/pb and so one file size to download from their own links provided these could also be apart of the frontend.

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Now that would be wicked you could also provide choices to install a chat tool inside your build for running a community that's either online or offline so you can actually go offline any time with a button and online with a button to get back to the community when you like, now that would be so cool using special build crawlers to drag down and vbuild data into custom archive frontends you could theme them as wellthat would be nice man.

Its like audiophiles....Some people listen to music some people listen to their sound system.

Well I've been looking for way to save everything in offline mode only stuff you want, and I came across this group just, I spotted your article here and it's made me think well why not...

Create a community driven nostalgic looking frontend that is categorised for eg. save sites to text and save sites to text with images/ save pdf/save video/save iso etcetc so you basically havwe a bridge to the web through this frontend it's own simple browser that can extract and download the content for offline frontend use cases with the format of your choice then you could have shares on a website or server of these builds people have made with the mb/gb/tb/pb and so one file size to download from their own links provided these could also be apart of the frontend.

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Now that would be wicked you could also provide choices to install a chat tool inside your build for running a community that's either online or offline so you can actually go offline any time with a button and online with a button to get back to the community when you like, now that would be so cool using special build crawlers to drag down and vbuild data into custom archive frontends you could theme them as wellthat would be nice man.