Intro! Data Hoarders Unite!

[gze]

Name: We're a plural system; our main hoarders go by G (they/them) and E (xey/xem/xeyr) respectively!

Hobbies/interests: alterhumanity, video games, writing, canines, D&D, toku, overthinking, drawing

Do you data hoard? If so, what do you hoard? Yes! We consider it our dragon's hoard. In no particular order, we've saved fanart, videos, music, fanfic, photos, personal records, health tips, community essays, screenshots of cool or informative posts we've come across, D&D notes, references, manuals, Game FAQs, language study guides, memes..... One of our oldest files is from 2003 that we found on an old floppy disk, a terrible school PowerPoint filled with pictures of George Bush, clipart, and Hamtaro characters????

(Organizing those files into folders is a very calming (and sometimes time sinking) activity, would recommend when needing an anxiety distractor.)

Why do you data hoard? For personal historical preservation, mainly! For some things it was to be able to watch offline in case the internet failed. Once we started really understanding that stuff online is not permanent and can be taken down at any time, and that hard drives can fail (or be stolen, both of which have happened to us before), it really made us paranoid want to archive stuff we really enjoy, or even stuff we don't fully enjoy but still want to look back on. This also includes our old chat histories, emails, screenshots of sites we were on in the past that we want to keep record of, the list goes on. Our first memory of doing this is keeping notebooks we passed back and forth with a friend in elementary school, and we are super grateful to still have them!

We also agree it's important to 'circulate the tapes' of media that is otherwise inaccessible, because capitalism sucks and preservation is very important. With unlimited time/resources/energy we would love to scan/rip all our rare media and archive those too.

Anything else? We're taking this love to grad school and starting a Master's in Information Science this coming spring! We hope to learn even more about archival and preservation that we can then take to our hoarding. For now, we're excited to learn new techniques and see posts from others who understand our niche interest! Already it's fun reading the intro posts to see what others have been hoarding!

Comments

[luckyzukky]

We also agree it's important to 'circulate the tapes' of media that is otherwise inaccessible, because capitalism sucks and preservation is very important. With unlimited time/resources/energy we would love to scan/rip all our rare media and archive those too.

super super agree!!!! i love to say "keep seeding the torrents" these days as a more current spin on the phrase, but "keep circulating the tapes" is still very true; keep copying, keep sharing, keep preserving!

if it's alright for this community i'm thinking about posting a little guide on how i rip DVDs with make MKV and then re-encode them into a friendlier format with minimal data loss. your line about ripping rare media for archival reminded me of that :P

[gze]

Yes that too!! We used to seed torrents back in the day, but...idk what we screwed up with our current computer, but torrenting stopped working one day and we've never been able to fix it :( We do want to get back into it with our newer Linux set-up though, hopefully that will work better! (Our current Windows set-up is too old, there's no point trying to go back and see what broke at this point haha)

That would be a helpful post I think! Our most recent experience with DVDs is Handbrake but that's as far as our own knowledge goes. We've never heard of MakeMKV! (Edit: just saw you already posted it, please ignore me kfdfhg)

-G