Intro

[biteshelter]

Name/Pseudonym: bites

Hobbies/interests: Programming, drawing, Linux, music

Do you data hoard? If so, what do you hoard?

I wouldn't say I'm much of a data hoarder as of yet. I'm used to downloading stuff but not keeping it long-term. With that being said, I do have some collections that could be considered hoards.

Hydrus Network keeps my collection of art by other people. I keep Calibre libraries for things like fanfiction, books, guides, research papers, zines, and keepsake games. There's also Flash games (I used to use the developer version of Flash player to load them, but now I use Ruffle), music (organized with Beets), sound samples, some random useful code snippets, and free graphics I've used. All of my own writings, art, etc. are also hoarded.

Why do you data hoard?

I started off collecting files for offline access. When I didn't think I needed something anymore, I'd delete it. After experiences of trying to find stuff I remembered seeing and then failing to find it or finding out it had been taken down, I started keeping what I considered the "most significant" files I got. Learning about data hoarding (and censorship, and websites disappearing) made me realize the importance of keeping data in general.

Hoarding my own creations, which I've always kept long-term, is mostly for preserving my improvements and work process over time. A large part of hoarding for me is keeping multiple versions of things. Sometimes that's done by just making copies while working, but nowadays I use git for a lot of my writing and coding.

Anything else? Excited to be here!

Here are a few extra things I was reminded of while writing this: Flashpoint Archive is a downloadable archive of Flash media with its own player, MusicBrainz Picard is another music tagger/organizer I've seen recommended for being simpler than Beets, and this is an open access research paper on version control for artists.