datahoarders | Entries tagged with introduction

Name/Pseudonym: flori or florianschild

Hobbies/interests: Some hobbies include The Sims, reading, vegan cooking, sewing, learning Italian, fitness, painting and papercrafts. Interests... hmm it might be easier to list things I'm NOT interested in. I'm curious to a fault.

Do you data hoard? If so, what do you hoard?I have a small collection right now that includes ebooks, youtube videos (mainly fan made audiobooks that I've enjoyed), sewing patterns, and some random PDFs and images that aren't well-organized.

Why do you data hoard Mainly fear lol. But seriously, my interest in data hoarding is because over time I've seen things I love disappear from the Internet forever and it makes me sad. I used to naively believe that once something was on the internet it was forever, but that's not true! At least not without data hoarders out there obsessively screenshotting and saving everything.

Anything else? I'm very interested in how people are storing and organizing very large collections that you don't need to access often (for example, I'm hoping to download and store a MASSIVE collection of youtube videos, likely 300-400 hours worth of video, as a personal backup in case a particular channel ever went offline. I'm exploring the best way to store that, considering I'll hopefully never actually need it. If you have any suggestions, I'd appreciate that!)

Another of my goals for data hoarding, at least for now, is around preserving aspects of my very tiny fandoms. I've noticed that things I bookmarked just few years ago are already gone with no trace and sometimes I don't even remember what exactly it is that's missing.

Finally, I have a goal of preserving my own internet activity more consciously. I like the idea of screenshotting everything I write and all the ephemera of my digital activity. Comments on random articles and videos, posts on Reddit, reviews of products... I'd love to have ALL of that stored in one place just for personal satisfaction.

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.

volkameria

Name/Pseudonym: Volkameria/Vol

Hobbies/interests: Video games, writing, baking, homemaking, reading, TTRPGs... basically if it's domestic and/or nerdy I'm on it.

Do you data hoard? If so, what do you hoard? Media of all kinds for personal use! TV shows, movies, ebooks, podcasts, tools, fanart/fanfics... if I like it, I probably have a local copy. I also like to hoard history that has been censored in the past, and history that could possibly get censored again; things like 1984, histories of terrorist organizations, Project 2025 and Christian Nationalism, etc.

Why do you data hoard: This is a combo of a few things. I firmly believe in having access to high quality and factual information. With the combination of rising authoritarianism, the loss of past generational resources, and the degradation of search engines due to AI slop, I still want to have access to information, guides, entertainment. With everything being a "license" to view something rather than just owning it as well, with content removed even if you pay for the service, there's simply no guarantee something you like can be available - which is just weird!

Anything else? I tend to be vaguely paranoid, so my apologies if I'm cagey around certain things! While I'm not very good at servers, I'm comfortable with scripts (especially Python), command line interfaces, and debugging code problems, so I'm happy to help with anything on that front.

doranwen

Name/Pseudonym: Doranwen

Hobbies/interests: fandom (over 20 of them), Linux, education

Do you data hoard? If so, what do you hoard? I hoard fanfiction (I adore ao3downloader and fichub-cli), movies (generally TV films that didn't make big budget), my favorite TV shows, ebooks on a variety of subjects, a few odd programs and games, and I have 14 terabytes of Yahoo Groups data on my hard drives because I got sucked into saving it (see

yahoogroups if you're curious about that project).

Why do you data hoard? Because you can't trust data to be available when you want it, sometimes because no one will sell it to you when you want it, but mainly because no one else saves it and then when you want it it's lost forever. Plus it's wonderful to have tons of stuff at your fingertips when the 'net is down; you might miss talking to someone but you have heaps you can watch or do.

Anything else? If you're interested in the Yahoo Groups project, it can use a ton of help tagging the groups so they can be organized properly (and uploaded to the Internet Archive). Not super hard, just takes the right kind of brain to love it.

malymin

Name/Pseudonym: Schaf, Malymin
Hobbies/interests:
Do you data hoard? If so, what do you hoard? I don't think I have as much of a "hoard" as I'd like, but I do tend to squirrel away PDFs (ranging from articles to entire books) and random image files on flash drives and hard drives. I also like to keep anime episodes (for easy watching without internet access) and abandonware games on my PC.
Why do you data hoard? When I was a kid I noticed that websites I loved would often go down and never come back, because the webmaster could no longer afford to keep the domain. As a result, the internet not being a place of permanence struck me pretty early on. In addition, two formative pieces of media for me (the 1990's "Petz" games, and the 1998 Toei adaptation of "Yu-Gi-Oh!") only manage to continue to exist and be experienced due to piracy-as-preservation. If something goes out of print in an official capacity, it's gotta be preserved and backed up somewhere. Also, I like researching various topics, and it's cheaper to build a little nest of free PDFs than to splurge on books, as much as I prefer reading paper to reading a screen...
Anything else? I'm probably not as cool or good at this as most people here. u_u; Hope you'll have me anyways!

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!

anomalymonster

Name/Pseudonym: An ongoing debate but Monsters, Anomaly, and Pomeg work

Hobbies/interests: Pokemon, alterhumanity and plurality, web development, art and writing, video games, cartoons

Do you data hoard? If so, what do you hoard?: We're still getting into it and might not consider ourselves a data hoarder per say but we've been adjacent to data hoarding for some time now. We discovered Hydrus Client and Zotero a few years back so we've been steadily building a collection of saved images, websites, and music.

We have a external HD on the backburner of stuff to buy, but for now we have two 1TB SSDs with the second being regulated to the media SSD. Though we've been learning how to use a web scraper which is going to help with the process of getting and tagging our files at least a lot easier.

Why do you data hoard: It started with the annoyance of not being able to find what we were looking for again once we lost it - both with websites and images. We aren't too as focused on preservation so much as the freedom of having our own library, but being on the internet for long enough means we've lost a lot of things we once liked to being deleted or privated.

Anything else?: We're a professional web developer but it's more "thing we do to make money" than thing we're good at. Some day we will learn how to do things with Python to make both of these easier.

We're also a multiple system, hence the plural pronouns.

luckyzukky

name: melo

hobbies/interests: self hosting and other related nerd stuff, k-pop & j-pop idols, tokusatsu, dc comics, and more

do you data hoard? if so, what do you hoard?: i hoard way too much! i run multiple media servers, some SFTP servers, and have a ton of stuff spread across different hard drives. it's just about anything - shows/movies/music, idol media, comics/manga, books, software, and so much more.

why do you data hoard: i strongly believe in preservation, and especially that the proliferation of data is key to preservation; more than physical, more than one copy on archive.org, proliferating data and sharing it with others, multiple people having the same copies of the same thing, is the ultimate way to preserve something. and if you couldn't tell by that, i'm a big fan of torrents lol

anything else?: ask me about servers :)

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: the heavy snow - nastyona

bedes

Decorative divider

Name/Pseudonym: Azure or Bede!

Hobbies/interests: I write, draw, code, and edit (gifs, images and videos), among other things. I really love animation and video games!

Do you data hoard? If so, what do you hoard?: I do! I hoard my own stuff (the previously-mentioned drawings, writings, coding projects and edits, as well as regularly backing up my and my husband's social media accounts), plus stuff related to my fandoms! I either archive things publicly (via one of my personal sites or archive.org), or privately (on Iris, my 1TB external drive).

Why do you data hoard?: I really got into data hoarding after the whole fiasco with Warner Bros removing several TV shows from their services for tax writeoffs. It was the catalyst to me realizing that I can't trust companies to preserve what I love; they'll make entire pieces of art illegal to watch, just to save a few pennies.

Anything else?: I'm an extreme newbie when it comes to datahoarding (as you can probably tell by me only having only one external drive), and I'm doing it on a very tight budget (which is why I only have the one external drive, lol). I hope I can still say some things of use when it comes to this topic, though! I'd also like to mention that I'm mentally disabled, so I may communicate in a strange way, but I promise I'm never trying to be rude or combative or passive-aggressive or robotic or etc.

Decorative divider

Current Mood: excited

scifirenegade

Name/Pseudonym: Bernie / Sci

Hobbies/interests: drawing, art in general, film, history, science fiction

Do you data hoard? If so, what do you hoard? Films, TV shows and books, besides my own stuff.

Why do you data hoard Preservation. Nobody owns anything anymore, and companies can pull the plug, and your favourite TV show is gone. Why yes, I am into the Lost Media (TM).

Anything else? I had all of Jacqueline Hill's available filmography (she was in Doctor Who), until I did NOT back up my videos and lost an episode of Angels she was in. I can't find it anymore.
Don't be like me. Do frequent backups.

toothpastepancake

Name/Pseudonym: Astrid
Hobbies/interests: Sci-fi media, writing, coding, video games, digital art, creativity-in-general
Do you data hoard? If so, what do you hoard? Yes! I data hoard... random things. I currently keep two different drives: a main one with other people's media--e.g. TV show episodes, music and music videos, book PDFs; and a personal interest drive, where I have an archive of all of my social media accounts, all of my old writing, my google drive, my art, and my favorite fanfics (both by me and by others).
Why do you data hoard? One of my favorite obscure Soundcloud songs got deleted and now I can never listen to it again :( Also, in this day and age, you don't actually own anything you buy on digital, etc etc and all of that. I want to have this data forever. I'm ALSO worried about potential censorship in my country :'(
Anything else? Hi I am your admin :)