Delete Never: The Digital Hoarders Who Collect Tumblrs, Medieval Manuscripts, and Terabytes of Text Files (gizmodo.com) 150
An anonymous reader shares a report: Online, you'll find people who use hashtags like "#digitalhoarder" and hang out in the 120,000-subscriber Reddit forum called /r/datahoarder, where they trade tips on building home data servers, share collections of rare files from video game manuals to ambient audio records, and discuss the best cloud services for backing up files. The often stereotyped hoarders letting heaps of physical items of questionable utility dominate their homes and lives often suffer social stigma and anxiety as a result. By contrast, many self-proclaimed digital hoarders say they enjoy their collections, can keep them contained in a relatively small amount of physical space, and often take pleasure in sharing them with other hobbyists or anyone who wants access to the same public data.
[...] Many people active in the data hoarding community take pride in tracking down esoteric files of the kind that often quietly disappear from the internet -- manuals for older technologies that get taken down when manufacturers redesign their websites, obscure punk show flyers whose only physical copies have long since been pulled from telephone poles and thrown in the trash, or episodes of old TV shows too obscure for streaming services to bid on -- and making them available to those who want them.
[...] Many people active in the data hoarding community take pride in tracking down esoteric files of the kind that often quietly disappear from the internet -- manuals for older technologies that get taken down when manufacturers redesign their websites, obscure punk show flyers whose only physical copies have long since been pulled from telephone poles and thrown in the trash, or episodes of old TV shows too obscure for streaming services to bid on -- and making them available to those who want them.
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I suspect the real hoarders are those who collect porn.
Why do you say that? Porn has a very short shelf life. People get bored of it quickly and chase what is new and novel. With music, you can get joy from listening to a song over the years. Do you have porn you enjoy looking at over the years? People often are often more excited to hear old songs than new. Do you ever feel that way with porn?
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I feel this way with my wife. I never get tired of her, although I know this is not really common.
Re:Amateurs (Score:4, Funny)
It's more common than you think; I never get tired of her either
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You're both in trouble. She told me she's sick of you both and thinks you're just going through the motions, too.
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I'm not tired of my wife either. After 26 years of marriage, she still fascinates me.
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Given how much vintage porn from the 70s is easily found on most tube sites, you might be surprised ... hell, the novelty of women with pubic hair might do it for you if you've grown up thinking women have always been bare.
If you only go for what is new and novel, you end up where most internet porn addicts get, that if it isn't extreme, offensive, and highly specific it no longer does anyth
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Re:Amateurs (Score:4, Insightful)
"Porn has a very short shelf life." TRANSLATION: "I have a very short attention span."
I'm not being randomly insulting...this is a big problem, especially among millennials. Before you accuse me of being get-off-my-lawn, check out the science. Research lately has been pointing to the fact that multi-tasking, looking at multiple screens with different content all day long, is leading to a statistically measurable and significant increase in attention span deficit.
I can see it in my roommate. She is 28 years old, and watches every movie on the TV with either a tablet in her hand for imgur/reddit/facebook/twitter or a phone in her hand for a video game. I'm quoting her the other day directly when I jokingly asked if she was physically able to watch a movie, 90 full minutes, without doing or looking at anything else and only using her mind to think about the one movie. She said: "I can't even imagine watching a movie without also tabletting!"
Thus, what you feel as "I can't watch the same porn again a second time" I suspect is "I need to continually watch new porn otherwise my brain gets bored/distracted/detached/aware-of-the-abyss".
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Of course. In fact, most of that new porn you are looking at is actually old porn being recycled.
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Modern day librarians and historians... (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA calls these people "hoarders," but I'd liken them to modern day librarians/historians. Preserving and maintaining old data is a noble endevour in my opinion. I still come across and enjoy listening/discovering old music that was created before I was even born. When I was a child, there were tons of video games advertised that I did not have the money to buy nor the hardware to fully run it on. Nowadays, I can download many of those old titles for free and run them in fairly good emulators on modern hardware. It's great!
Re:Modern day librarians and historians... (Score:5, Insightful)
This right here. However it's important to print out and distribute the survival stuff and how to rebuild our technology as the electricity required to access the repository of knowledge and culture is the first thing to go during a disaster.
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TFA calls these people "hoarders," but I'd liken them to modern day librarians/historians.
Like in the real world, I think most are actually just hoarders dragging in any old junk without any time or interest to sort it out and certainly not put it on display or give it out again. Yes, some people are genuinely collectors trying to preserve a piece of history but most are just trying to dump the Internet to disk. I was there a while and I think I still have old CD/DVD folders with MP3s and DVD rips laying around somewhere, none of it worthy of preservation. It used to grow in leaps and bounds fro
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Ha. I finally junked my CD cases and stuffed a few binders full of CDs and liners. Yes, I loved some of those liners.
And I have multiple libraries of rips, some .WAV, MP3 at two different rates, AAC, and OGG. If I could I would have ATRAC5 also. And a shameful amount of 'free' music downloaded from wherever, 'music' being a term not well suited to a lot of it. Free music is a lot like free fish, don't smell it.
I have all my emails from multiple accounts from 1996 to 2004, and most everything from 2004 on. M
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I still have the Windows 1 and Windows 2 executables that I downloaded years ago when I had a second hand 1200 baud modem. My first 1200 baud modem had a 2500 set grafted on the side connected by a cable.
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I finally trashed my copy of Balance of Power. Could not find a way to make it run on anything.
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It is rather ironic that pirates preserved the digital culture of old 8-bit games and apps on the Apple ][, C64, Atari, etc.
Many of these software titles are so obscure that they would have been lost to the annals of time otherwise.
It's fun to reverse engineer the copy protection, Virtual Machines, and p-code that some of them used. Yes, people were using VMs in the 80's such as Zork.
Sometimes old classics like Oregon Trail are better then the shitty pay to win remake.
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You're revealing more about yourself than about the world.
_NSA_ (Score:3)
Hoarder No 1: NSA
Hoarder No 2: Google
Hoarder No 3: Facebook
etc...
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https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/... [thesun.co.uk]
I miss my dead trees... (Score:2)
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Why internet? My work machine ... (Score:3)
I count about 8 Tb spread across several machines as my current disk usage. Wondering if this is high, low or medium in technology sectors. None of it are videos or animations. Not much of bmp files, or binaries. Images are, at best, jpgs.
Re:Why internet? My work machine ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Every time I get a new laptop, I take the files on the desktop of the old laptop and put them in a dated folder on the desktop of the new one. So on my current laptop, I have "Old Laptop - 2018-01-18". Inside that is another old laptop folder and inside that is another one. There are files that are a decade old in there which I haven't looked at in nine years, but I don't get rid of them because "maybe I'll need this one day and it only takes up a couple of MB."
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I do this too
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Obligatory xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/1360/ [xkcd.com]
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Where I am working now four of the other six employees have been there 20-30 years.
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Re:A quiet but growing problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Well how much physical media has been lost, destroyed, degraded over the ages. The burning of the Library of Alexandra has been said to set mankind back Hundreds of years.
During revolutions it is popular to burn and destroy material from opposing ideas. Storing and preserving such media is a multi-generational activity, which requires a lot of capital, as well danger (from such revolutions), Digital Storage is cheap, and big. For under $10,000 a hobbies in digital archiving can collect enough data to fill up the worlds largest physical library in physical media. If we have thousands of people doing this hobby, who will then copy the data to new media, we are better off then we ever were.
The key advantage of digital media, the more times your copy it, the safer the data. Because a digital copy is an exact copy of the data. So unlike taking a Tape Recording of a Tape Recording by the 3rd or 4th copy its quality is nearly useless. Or trying to transcribe books, where errors from human translation happens (see the joke from Red Dwarf [quotegeek.com] can happen.
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I think you are missing point.
Physical media in practical terms, isn't any better then digital media in terms of long term storage. There is a theoretical advantage, but practical there isn't.
The reason why Stupidity and Ignorance have stood the test of time, because we as humans are still animals, with primitive and instinctive actions, which have came from hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The urge to destroy a threat is in us all, as it is a good way to normally insure your survival. Now the p
“Cloud backup” (Score:3, Insightful)
I was just looking for another way to backup my NAS. I had been using CrashPlan on Linux but as I have approached 7TB I’d data, mostly unedited video, and lost my baseline, it has become way to slow. :)
It is interesting that if I want to backup 10TB, the cheapest solution I have found is to place a small QNAP (1 or 2 drive) at a friends house and run run sync backup between them. It has a break even at 1 1/2 year, power bill included. Since we are on 100 megabit internet it is fast enough.
Was looking at backblaze b2 as alternate solution.
I am not aware of any other backup provider than CrashPlan that offers unlimited space using a Linux client. The speed issue seems to be a single threaded java program that does client side deduplication. It will take me 7 months to reestablish baseline. 2 months when I exported the VM with the backup client and ran it on a cpu with faster single core performance.
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I use Spideroak, but the client has similar performance issues. It's at least not Java but it uses an Sqlite database and a hell of a lot of disk/RAM thrashing.
I don't think any of them have a decent client app.
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I think it is like most cloud solutions(backup, mail, office solution etc). It is fine for "regular" PC backup $5 a month and you have a backup of your computer without having to muck about with it. But special use cases require a bit more.
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I was able to backup a bit more than 8TB with Backblaze Personal ($5/mo. for unlimited storage) in about a week. That said, I'm backing up from a Windows box with a direct-attached RAID enclosure, just because I wanted to avoid issues like limitations on backing up network drives or client platforms. I know it's possible to backup a NAS on Backblaze Personal via iSCSI (since it appears to be a local drive to Backblaze), but the people I've heard who use iSCSI for that purpose don't seem to recommend it. Eve
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I backed up with BackBlaze as well. In my case, it was about 4TB, but it took me over a month to complete the first full backup thanks to poor upload speeds. (Not BackBlaze's fault. My local ISP.)
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Deduplication is a problem with CrashPlan on large datasets. You can disable it here.
https://support.code42.com/Cra... [code42.com]
It says "don't do it" every two lines but it sped up my backup speed by more than 10 times after a few TB.
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Thanks, I'll give it a whirl since I am about to cancel it anyway. Better do a restore test though. :D
There isn't any huge gain anyway since it is video anyway.
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It is interesting that if I want to backup 10TB, the cheapest solution I have found is to place a small QNAP (1 or 2 drive) at a friends house and run run sync backup between them.
Is that a cheaper solution than unplugging the drive and walking over to your friend's house with it?
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No you are right, I guess the cheapest solution is the Adidas net with a 12TB USB drive. :D
But I still want to geek out a bit I suppose.
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Dual qnap boxes, one at a remote location with an openvpn tunnel from the remote qnap to my home router is the route I went too. So much cheaper and the data stays under your own control so long as you trust where ever you have chosen to keep your remote qnap. Use the full disk encryption with an unstored key and if the remote qnap were ever stolen it's data is inaccessable. You can get cheap older qnap nas units off ebay, They don't need to be exceedingly fast newer units. I just rsync my local qnap to the
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This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things (Score:3)
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Then what did they mean by unlimited?
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Then what did they mean by unlimited?
They meant "but don't be a dick". Now it means "this is why we can't have nice things".
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so using their service of "unlimited" means that I'm abusing it? clearly there needs to be some clarification in their business model. It's like the old Flip Wilson story about the Lemonade stand:
As a kid, I used to have a lemonade stand. The sign said, "All you can
drink for a dime." So some kid would come up, plunk down the dime, drink a
glass, and then say, "Refill it." I'd say, "That'll be another dime." "How
come? Your sign says--" "Well, you had a glass, didn't you?" "Yeah." "And
that's all you can drink for a dime."
-- Flip Wilson
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Yes. It's like any resource that's obviously shared with other people. Even if you can technically take all you want, you probably shouldn't. Life is not a game to be exploited for maximum personal gain without regard to others. Not to say that it would violate any TOS, just to say "don't be a dick".
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it's a virtual resource, I can't tangibly hold it therefore I don't care how much I use; end of story.
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Do you feel the same way about electricity?
Backend storage is a tangible resource. Bandwidth (well, routers) is a tangible resource.
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your examples are still not fully opaque. Electricity is traded as a commodity, routers and networks could be but aren't. If you don't charge me for my usage but charge me bulk pricing that disregards patterns of usage then what do you care how much of it that I use? I think we've now transcended into a net neutrality debate. I'll use my unlimited bandwidth on my unlimited storage in an unlimited way, after all that's what I pay for.
I have no pity for business that promises and prices "unlimited" services a
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The flip side is there's no justification for outrage when the "unlimited" plan is suddenly cancelled. Tragedy of the commons, really.
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1) Build Services that allow for "unlimited"
2) ???
3) Profit!
the essential business model for E business and why they fail.
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They meant "but don't be a dick". Now it means "this is why we can't have nice things".
At what number does "unlimited" turn into "being a dick". Is someone's 500GB collection of dickbutt drawings more or less dickish than someone else's 2TB photo library they have amased over the years?
You want me to not be a dick, stop being arbitrary and tell me at where you draw the dick in the sand.
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It sounds to me like an engineering problem, not a gross profitability problem. They probably engineered their storage environment for any one customer blob to not exceed some size, and when it does it deducts from the efficiency of the whole system incurring dramatically higher costs.
You would think generally one guy with 10 TB is offset by dozens of people buying plans who have mere gigabytes of storage consumed if you're just thinking in terms of their cost per TB of storage.
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It's not like they store your data file by file. It goes into some kind of database/filesystem organizational structure which in turn is stored on a filesystem at the OS level to provide operational redundancy/virtualization. The underlying storage system itself is stored on the storage system's LUNs which need to also be able to be replicated or mirrored elsewhere.
At some level of data storage consumption, the amount stored by a "data archivist" exceeds one of these defined storage sizes, like data entry
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CrashPlan closed their consumer-facing unlimited storage cloud backup option because of people like this. It wasn't the 98% of the people using the service but the small minority of folks that backed up terabytes of data in collections like those here that made it unprofitable for them to continue operating. The digital hoarders really killed that service, ratter than the regular users.
STOP making bullshit excuses for a company already. Anyone who is wiling to offer an "unlimited" plan should be prepared for exactly that. And if you can't manage to be profitable off "the 98%", then you didn't stand a chance anyway. Your business plan was fucked from Day 1.
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And they did offer just that. They never limited things. It was when a small group of users pushed things to the point it was unprofitable for the company that they closed their consumer business. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, and others never would have put in caps on their own service if it weren't for those that go far and away above the general user. It's those users that cost all of us.
The end result of offering "unlimited" plans should come as no surprise to anyone in any business at this point. And if you can't manage to be profitable off the other 95%+ who don't abuse your service, then your business model was doomed anyway. Stupidity deserves to be rewarded with bankruptcy in that case, and I'm not about to make excuses for the fucking morons who refuse to account for human behavior or learn from history.
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Take that stance all you like. The point is to stop crying that companies are putting caps in place. If some didn't choose to be abusive of them, we'd all still be enjoying things without any caps, should there be times when our usage is more than normal.
There you go again, making pathetic excuses for companies who fail to understand human behavior. Stop doing that stupid shit already. The actual point here is understanding and accepting human behavior. If you don't like it when even 1% of your user base takes FULL advantage of your "unlimited" offering, then STOP being that idiot who offers unlimited plans.
And no, I'm not one of those 500TB hoarders who abuses the shit out of these offerings. I barely have a couple hundred GB stored in the cloud in tot
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You seem to have a total inability to understand why companies offer "unlimited" options. It's all about marketing, but that point seems to be so far over your head that you can't even begin to comprehend. But keep crying about it, it's pretty funny.
I don't care if it's defined as mere marketing or not; stand behind your product and offering, or shut the hell up.
1 - 10% of your user base "abusing" an unlimited plan should never be enough to destroy your product. If it is, then you were stupid enough to allow it in the first place. Don't bitch about gambling if you can't afford to lose.
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I'd bet that 1% of your user base could easily destroy your product if they are those type of people who try uploading 500 TB of data to your file sharing site just to see if they can. You gotta put some sane limits into your product to product yourself from abusers like that.
You're likely right for a lot of companies out there. And there's a rather simple answer to that pseudo-problem.
Stop offering "unlimited" bullshit.
When the default human response to "idiot-proof" is to build a better idiot, it tends to justify that sane limits are necessary to combat against human behavior, which is as predictable as the wind.
We can have nice things. But obviously trying to change human behavior is akin to bending the laws of physics.
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Ever terabytes should not matter (Score:2)
It wasn't the 98% of the people using the service but the small minority of folks that backed up terabytes of data
It sure seems like 1-3% of customers storing many terabytes of data would come off as a rounding error in how much storage you would actually need to store hundreds of thousands of customers worth of data anyway...
They would also be doing you a bit of a service by stress-testing everything for extreme cases.
If that much more data is seriously a problem, then why not offer tiers like 0-2 TB (nor
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Clearly it was more than as simple as a rounding error, as they shut down the consumer service due to the abuses.
Or maybe they only wanted larger customers and not have to deal with so many smaller customers that could each generate support requests.
As I said, if cost was an issue they could have just implemented tiered pricing.
In a way they did - they just have only the upper level tier now, and provided free migration to the small business plan. As it is, that plan is still only $10 / device / month, not
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So, really, they were offering 1 TB (or 2 TB etc) service but they got the benefit of lying and saying their service was unlimited, which attracted more customers. Cry me a river that they'll have to accurately market what they are offering.
It's one thing to say "unlimited" when there is an inherent cap on the cost you could incur per customer (e.g., if you offer "unlimited long distance calling" there are a finite number of minutes in a month) and you can decide that it actually makes sense to offer an "un
Misunderstanding the problem: blaming wrong party. (Score:2)
No, the unsustainable terms of service ("unlimited") were the problem and that was always strictly under the control of the service provider, in fact that offer predates any of the clients using the service for what it was said to be. Microsoft made the same bad choice with its storage system which was once offered on an "unlimited" tier. Nobody has unlimited quantities of anything so offering such is unrealistic. It's not a clie
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People collect everything! (Score:3)
People pretty much will collect anything and everything if possible. So it shouldn't be a surprise that there would be folks who collect data. The interesting part is going to be what happens to that data when they pass away?
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People pretty much will collect anything and everything if possible.
Thus confirming the conspiracy theory that were seeded on Earth as a mining solution to gather up a bunch of shit by some really low-effort aliens.
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People pretty much will collect anything and everything if possible. So it shouldn't be a surprise that there would be folks who collect data. The interesting part is going to be what happens to that data when they pass away?
Same thing that happens to the book collection(s) of folks who pass away - someone else might pick it up (books with any actual value at a yard/estate sale, data by way of "...oh, a pile of disk drives for a buck? Sure, what the hell? I can make a cheap NAS out of it or something..." at the same estate sale.)
Similarly, the kids/heirs might scrounge through that data if they see value in it (hypothetical: "oh shit - DeadGrandpa mentioned that he had mined quite a bit of $RandoCoin back in the day, and it's w
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You can make candles with that. They don't smell good.. but they work.
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Storage is cheap, cheap storage leads to bad stuff (Score:2)
There used to be the notion of data retention, it was embedded in mainframes and OS stacks dating back to the 70s to prevent this kind of thing. Data owners had to take proactive steps to ensure retention. I myself have found that a few DROBOs filled up act nicely to preserve all that ancient knowledge, like my old MSDN CDs that had all the C++ documentation before they purged it in favor of C# and my Leisure Suit Larry collection. So don't call us hoarders, call us digital monks of the digital monastery s
It's not hoarding... (Score:2)
Someone who hoards, hides away what they accumulate.
The two are not the same. But since the term "hoarder" is en-vogue people want to use it for notoriety's sake. Morons.
It would be interesting.... (Score:2)
I'd be afraid to (Score:2)
I remember Paul "Pee Wee" Herman got hit for having Child Pornography he'd bought in a massive lot of vintage photos. He was wealthy enough to fight it off and win, but he also won because it was physically in sealed boxes so when they raided him he could legally say he's never set eyes on the stuff. With digital you can't really do that, so unless you're so rich folks look the other way (like Epstein) your life is over.
Digital Velum (Score:2)
Re:Digital Vellum (Score:2)
What would Brewster say? (Score:2)
the wayback machine anyone?
Maybe they should talk about that too.
We either need to redefine the term "hoarder" (Score:1)
look what I just found in my files ... (Score:3)
Look what I just found in my extensive digital records:
Digital Hoarding Can Make Us Feel Just as Stressed and Overwhelmed as Physical Clutter, Research Suggests [slashdot.org] — 8 January 2019
And, no, I don't feel stressed in the least.
great idea (Score:2)
collect all those rare files and put them on a cloud, because, you know, then they will be saved forever!
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I think the difference would be if they classify and organize the data. Or they just dump it all to the D:\ Drive (or /mnt/Archive directory)
Data is useless if you cannot find it again.
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To be fair, even if you never archived or organized any data, most competent OSes have file indexing that allows you to still search through a pile of random crap and still have a half-assed chance of finding it... doubly so if that crap is ASCII/text-based.
One time, that indexing even saved my bacon, allowing me to reconstruct roughly 180GB of suddenly disorganized-by-filesystem-error-then-recovered CG asset (Poser-readable) files. I still keep that directory hanging around today, as it contains stuff with
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Yahoo categorization method was a good fit for the time. Altavita sucked, because we couldn't find what we were looking for. Google Applied better technology and helping categorize information better.
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In a sense, it IS kind of like having a house with rooms piled floor to ceiling.
Consider for a moment the data on a 250GB USB1.1 hard drive frome sometime around 2006. Ignoring for a moment the increasing annual possibility of drive failure due to age, imagine trying to look for a file on that drive. At USB 1.1 speeds, the disc is for all intents and purposes locked away and unusable (at least, from the perspective of Windows Explorer or Gnome 3's file manager, especially if the computer has antivirus softw
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But this illustrates a good point in digital preservation. It requires upkeep. You need to continue to move data to new formats as they become av
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There are two kinds of BD-R (recordable blu-ray) discs.
The first ones that came out had a shiny metallic layer that permanently dulled when the laser burned it. The technology was used precisely because everyone knew by that point that recordable discs based upon organic dyes had a TERRIBLE track record for long-term stability. By the time development of BD-R discs began, nearly ALL 10+ year old CD-R discs had at least some unreadable sectors, and DVD+R and DVD-R had an even WORSE track record. The catch wa
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Broadly speaking, the cheapest non-LTH discs are usually going to be at least twice as expensive as the most expensive LTH discs. Of course, you might always get lucky and trip over a liquidation sale or something, but most of the time, you can just ignore the cheapest discs entirely and take for granted that they're going to be LTH. [...] Likewise, store-brand and non-major brand discs are almost ALWAYS going to be LTH.
This hasn't been my experience at all. I've bought several packs of the cheapest generic discs available on Amazon (Optical Quantum, Plexdisc, ValueDisc...), and all were definitely HTL. LTH discs seem to be rather uncommon and, strangely enough, more expensive (at least on Amazon). I guess it could be different in retail stores.
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If you wouldn't mind, can you read the MID codes from those discs & post them here? (You can use a tool like CDspeed to read the MID code -- http://www.cdspeed2000.com/ [cdspeed2000.com] ).
Ultimately, the MID code is the final authority on whether or not a disc is HTL or LTH, because it's how the drive determines its writing strategy.
My guess is that the manufacturer of the discs you bought just decided that it didn't even HAVE to identify its discs as "LTH" on the packaging anymore, and didn't.
I suppose it's not inconce