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  • Avoid hoarding? I don't understand. My 30 TB file server can be expanded further still.

  • I have a lot of ebooks that I download for university research, hobby learning and friends who ask for help sourcing books. I put everything in my calibre library, which is great for metadata management (tip: I have it set so new books that I've just imported get a tag of "new", which I remove when I have processed their metadata. This allows me to chip away at ensuring the metadata is correct and good, even if I don't do it at time of import).

    Anyway, at one point I found myself at risk of becoming overwhelmed by books, because if I'm wanting to learn some category theory, for example, I'd have multiple books that seem to be relevant. Some of them were recommended by programmers, some of them assume a higher level of maths background knowledge, some of them are more fun to read — once upon a time I might've known which was which, but if there's a significant gap between me downloading stuff and using it (which is often the case, I'm quite opportunistic with book recommendations), I may forget. Making a note of why I downloaded a particular book is something I've been trying to do more, so I can identify the useful things at the right time — the calibre notes field can work for that, but I'm still figuring out how to manage this in a wider sense because I do a lot of reading and it's easy to forget why I'm reading a particular thing. I think I have a calibre plugin to show which things I've read also.

    Another related thing is that I will take a cursory look over a book when I download it, and I may delete it and not put it into my calibre library. This feels significant because downloading a book doesn't make it one of my books, 'taking it home' and putting it away on my 'bookshelf' makes it mine. In short, I try to be mindful in my curation activities, recognising that doing it in big clumps with my whole collection doesn't really work and that pruning little and often helps more.

  • A) Almost every day. I have a constant backlog/watchlist but it's small and fairly constant.

    B) Once or twice a year I go over my media and delete movies or shows that I'm definitely not watching again. I am hoarding, though only the good stuff. Nothing wrong with that.

  • Like others here, I tend to only download when I find (or remember) something I like. Most of the stuff I have was either downloaded to watch or listen to right away. Others are things I watched at some point, or that I just finished and really liked. Especially anything exclusive from the current services since they don't bother to release physical copies (or even legal digital purchases for that matter). When they do release a disc they fuck up getting any money from me by virtue of a HD/4k being only released on DVD.

    After seeing the more and more open statements and updated TOS's about losing things if they just decide to ditch an outlet. I finally got around to getting a BDXL drive for my PC and flashed the unlock firmware. So I plan to rip my discs to have all the access I can give myself. Sadly I really really need to commit to getting some actual capacity drives, and move my server to a dedicated PC and not just keep running off my daily PC (though it can handle double duty pretty easy after a couple of years of big upgrades).

    Weirdly enough my legal digital libraries tend to have more of an issue with "hoarding" if there are like "Steam sales" on whatever service. Also tend to get things that are part of Movies Anywhere since it is basically the closest thing to having a bit of protection of not losing stuff if any one service closes. Helpful for my current lacking of proper drive space. And I plan to rip those streams once the other PC gets built (or until I build a new main PC and setup the current as dedicated).

  • I avoid hoarding by only grabbing things I know I'll use. With movies/shows, if I haven't used it in three months, it goes away. With music, I tend to go in cycles through genres where I'll be vibing to a given type of music for a month or two, then switch things up. So the cutoff is much longer, years in fact.

    But books are a slower thing to begin with. I'm a notoriously fast reader, capable of consuming light fiction at a book and a half to two books a day. Something like the Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris, as an example, I can zip through the entire series in under a week if nothing interferes. But even at that speed (which isn't consistent when there's heavier material), it would still take years to go through my digital library. Plus, the files are small enough that I don't have to worry about the space, so they only get deleted if I dislike something new.

    The exception to all of that is some classics that I keep around just for the hell of it. Like, I have all the Hitchcock movies, but only watch any given one maybe once in five years. So I still have most of a terabyte of movies that's as permanent as possible barring redundant storage all failing at once.

    Music is similar, especially since most of it is in flac format. There's some stuff I may not listen to often, but I want to keep immediately available.

    Which, believe it or not, isn't hoarding. I go through things and weed out fairly regularly. It's just that after a collection is big enough, it takes longer to cycle through and use a given file again. Stuff that's used isn't hoarded.

  • I watch movies and series once, and keep them on my hard drive until I'm running out of space, then delete from the oldest to newest. Music I'll consume very regularly.

  • I have two servers, a >100TB rack-mounted Supermicro archive that doesn't get fired up often, and an Intel NUC that runs 24/7 but only draws 5W at idle. The NUC with its mere 4TB SSD is only for content I'm actively watching which gets deleted immediately afterwards. Running just the Supermicro made more sense when I had a terrible internet connection and had to wait for everything but I moved to an area with 1Gb+ connectivity a few years ago and subsequently needed to save on energy costs.

    I feel like the real question you want to ask yourself is, "how likely is it that this particular content will still be available on Usenet/torrents in a few years?" Some stuff is much more niche and rare while other movies/shows each have over a dozen redundant releases, at least a few of which will more or less always be available somewhere. To put things in perspective, it also helps to do an analysis of how much you're spending each month in order to avoid what you would be paying in streaming and licensing costs, including hardware, power, and connectivity. If that ratio gets too high then it's time to scale back.

    • how likely is it that this particular content will still be available on Usenet/torrents in a few years?

      I've had quite a bit of trouble finding the old Rome Total War some time ago, before the remaster was released. I've took the chance to get Medieval 2 as well. Both are sitting on my hard drive, guess they're worth keeping for longer

  • when a wildfire took down my internet last month I sure didn't regret hoarding. I had plenty of unseen entertainment at my disposal, watched a bunch of new shows. when it did come back I decided not only to keep hoarding anything interesting to me, but to invest in a new backup drive to keep the hoard safe lol.

  • I keep the stuff I download and seed it until I run out of room, I have a TB hdd for movies and such; and since I download like huge files, I usually delete stuff if I don't care about it a lot

  • All the few shows/movies on my hard drive I end up watching when I get around to it and feel like watching. Though, recently, there have been 3 specific cartoons I've been watching a lot more of due to not feeling like watching other shows.

    So far, the only things I have got that were bad quality and unwatchable were 2 cartoons. One you could easily tell it was upscaled and just looked a bit off, making it feel uncomfortable for me to watch and enjoy. The other, first episode in and they cut the theme song and had the channel watermark, for a show that's a few decades, so I didn't bother checking the other episodes and just deleted it. With the first show, I looked immediately because there was a specific episode I needed to check, but the other, it took me over a half a year to finally check to see how good quality it is/was.

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