Data Hoarder

I’ve been collecting genealogical data for the last 15 years. You better believe I keep that organized, otherwise I would be screwed.

I agree. As I get older I want more out of my hobbies than just fun and stress reduction. I want to grow, learn a useful skill, engage with media that resonates with me emotionally. Organizing files accomplishes none of those things. Low value way to spend my time.

Collecting things is fun. If you don't turn it into obsession

Did you recently have a wake-up call that made you think death is coming soon? I have, and it made me re-evaluate my archiving, in the sense that:

(1) For me, it's only worth organizing if I can find some memories later.

(2) There are some great tools like Hazel (on Mac) to auto-sort.

(3) Otherwise, it must be autotelic.

There is joy in being AUTOTELIC, when you enjoy the process of something for its own sake. No one else has to know or understand, as long as it matters to YOU!!! I want everyone who sees this to know this word, it's very powerful and meaningful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotelic

because I believe that in the future, the governments will make it very difficult to share copyrighted media online

How do you believe this will happen? I hear this sentiment a lot but never a well put together explanation of how one thinks this is possible...

I just do the most basic lazy cataloging like music, shows, games etc. Some people like to do the extended cataloging, it's a hobby for them, so I say if it's fun for them then why not? It's not a waste of time then. If not then yeah, you don't have to force yourself just for sake of clarity/ocd.

If you enjoy doing it,

why does it matter?

I'm caught in this trap and it's turned my love/hate of hoarding into hate/love. I currently have 40TB+ of files to organize, but put it off because it's such a chore.

But, I do it because not organizing it would mean I wouldn't know what I have and where to find it. With proper organization and tools like Everything and VVV (Virtual Volumes View), I can find anything within seconds, as long as I know something about what I'm looking for.

/r/lostredditors ?

I use a desktop app called Neofinder which scans any hard drive. As long as there’s at least a name (I add a date as well) that helps you find something, then it’s easy to search for it and find it using the app. It also shows me how many copies I have which lets me help decide if I can erase a drive if I need space.

nah i enjoy collecting music and sorting things 😤😤😤

I just use filebot

Here's one way I look at it. You could spend countless hours meticulously going through every file and grouping, renaming, etc. Or. You could take time, create a script to automate it all for you. This does a couple things:

1. You get some experience learning how to script dealing with file organization
2. You save time since you're automating a lot of formerly time-consuming activities thus freeing up time to do other things.

Also:

I will also delete stuff that I've watched/played that I didn't enjoy. I've come to a realization there's no point archiving it if I'm never going to use it again.

BLASPHEMY!!!

The data hoard must grow.

The simple fact that redditors here feel the NEED to downvote anyone who agrees with me, shows that they're emotionally conflicted with their unhealthy obsessions, and they're looking for a way to COPE by downvoting people who have taken control over their lives. Because those redditors know deep inside that they have no control over their OCD habits, and seeing those who have claimed control makes them feel uneasy.

If you have as much fun organising your media as you do consuming that media, then that is time well spent.

I'm not going to stop hoarding anytime soon.

I don't like not being dependent on subscription streaming services and DRM platforms like Steam.

    It makes me happy to look at my collection. Even if I'm not opening the files, just seeing a folder full of thumbnails of every issue of Nintendo Power magazine, or that dream collection of old console game ROM, brings out that eight year old whose family could afford to get me two NES games a year - one on Christmas, one on my Birthday, and that was a HUGE deal for me. It gives me this little spike of dopamine just see it and remind myself it's there. It's mine. It's a collection. I get a thrill from collecting it.

    A lot of people, they sit in front of a screen, they scroll Facebook, they seem gossipy bullshit about vapid celebrities, the same generic, memey "riding the wave of trends so you'll like me" reels made by people who will be end up the subject of some drama YouTuber's expose in a few years, and of course the ever-important "here's your super toxic thing of the day, make sure to get as furious as possible at this, while we go ruin people's lives for participting it, and then for agreeing with it, and then for disagreeing with it, but not loudly enough" shit that twists them into knots and re-affirms on a daily basis that the world is a horrible place and everything is bad and they should be fucking miserable.

    I sit in front of a screen and catalog and sort all the wonderful things that make me feel excited. So maybe no one else will ever see it. Maybe I'm not impressing anyone else. Who cares? We need to stop basing our valuations of things on whether or not it gets us attention or appreciation from others. This stuff makes me happy. That's enough.

This is just your personal issue, doesn't apply to others. Although the process you're doing is too excessive with the sorting and such.

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

As with everything, moderation is key.

I love organizing shit, and so I don’t mind giving hours of my life towards doing something I enjoy.

A similar disclaimer could probably be pinned to every single subreddit

Over the last 2 years, I've noticed that I spend WAY more time carefully cataloguing my collections of digital media (games, anime) than actually experiencing those media.

Collecting is the fun part. Its the keeping up to date, that is the mindboggling dull part.

If you collect good comic series, well, ... trying to keep track of new releases that you want to read is annoying. Same with web series or web novels. Note: Non-US (EU) comic series are much harder to keep track off, as most programs focus on US comics.

Why collect/horde the amounts of data we consume and not index it up? Getting it is the easy part. Getting it Indexed, Data'd, Tagged, etc. is the hard part. We live for this!

Collecting things as a hobby has been a thing since forever.

Collecting stamps, collecting coins etc.

How exactly do you "enjoy" a stamp or coin or a whatever collection?

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

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

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.

If you’re not enjoying it then yes, it’s a waste of time. For me, the setup is the hobby, and I throughly enjoy it.

On the contrary, don't be like me and lose vintage footage from simpler times that I can never get back due to sheer incompetence and laziness. Thankfully I still have my memories, for now.

Maybe I wanted to be the next Marion Stokes. Have you considered that?

Nah. Life is short = do what makes you happy and feels good. If that’s cataloging your data then so be it.

It becomes more with it once other people can consume the media. My son prefers streaming over my carefully curated collection, but he does say lost appreciate not having commercials.

Also, his taste in media sucks. Just have to say it.

I only organize what I have 'consumed' and it's totally worth it. Would be kinda hard to organize media not knowing what it is, so the problem of "doing something that's not enjoyable, instead of experiencing the media I've collected" is not something I have experienced :D

Time spent obsessively cataloguing = time not spent obsessively downloading new stuff

A good reminder! I find parts of my organizing relaxing, but there's definitely a line to be aware of.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I've realized this recently too

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.

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

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