Compulsive digital hoarding

[The Eye]

I think I may have a problem.

In all this years I:
-Never deleted an e-mail.
-Saved every single picture and image I found moderately amusing
-Bookmarked every single site I found moderately amusing, with the excuse I would read/look at it later (Never did).

Any tips on how to deal with it? Or where to start cleaning up?

[Leucis]

I think I may have a problem.

In all this years I:
-Never deleted an e-mail.
-Saved every single picture and image I found moderately amusing
-Bookmarked every single site I found moderately amusing, with the excuse I would read/look at it later (Never did).

Any tips on how to deal with it? Or where to start cleaning up?

I've done this on my devices far too much. On a day you're not feeling particularly interested in looking at the pictures you own, I'd recommend setting some guidelines for what you want to delete. (Usually when looking through my images, I select the images that are photos relating to schoolwork I no longer need, blurry images, pictures I'll never look at again (with the exception of things like vacation pictures: my parents like to keep those), and images I can very easily find online again.) Hitting the delete button only once after you've selected the pictures you don't need is actually quite satisfying.

If you're not the type to lose motivation after a single day, try going through maybe 1-3 folder(s) per day or working on your bookmarks.

These are pretty generic, but setting a goal usually helps me quite a bit with cleaning up. I never set goals for anything else, but it's surprisingly helpful.

[Jastiv]

I usually just get a new computer by that point, and only copy over the files I actually use/ develop, making backup disks of everything else even remotely of interest.

[halfeye]

Storage is very cheap, if your time is worth any money at all, you lose money by taking the time to delete things unless you delete everything at once.

[wumpus]

1. Unless you have so much spam that your email is useless or people communicate to you entirely by recorded video-selfies email can't take up a significant amount of storage (especially on rotating disks). Back it up and don't worry about it.

2. Historically, hard drives have obeyed Moore's law even better than transistors, but this seems to have stopped roughly around the rise of SSDs. Before, you could simply buy a hard drive twice as big as the last one and simply keep storing your entire life's accumulation of data without difficulty.

3. Actual *production* of terabytes of data seems to have stopped increasing: people aren't uploading video-selfies or streaming data from google-glasses. As mentioned above email is small, pictures are in the megabytes (i.e. ~100,000 per terabyte of hard drive space) so really don't take up much space. Bookmarks are what, less than 1k a pop? Probably smaller than a "proper" (i.e. 140 characters, no picture) tweet. Just get a hard drive (really, two. You want a backup).

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/in...rt=ppgb&page=1 here is a list of hard drives. I just sort via "price per byte" and look for reliable drives. Right now a 3T Hitachi drive is "winning", which I'm pretty sure is a historically reliable drive (only one model was called the "deathstar", all others have been fantastic). Another way is via bluray, but that probably has worse overall reliability* and probably doesn't gain much on a per/GB basis (although backing up should work better).

Sounds like hording such is a non-problem. Organizing it is another issue. You might try partitioning a drive to put email and bookmarks (and any other text-based system) onto a drive that will index things for searching (*warning*, this can easily fill up drives and really isn't made for data-horders in mind) and another one for pictures (I'd *think* that it wouldn't try to index pictures and other binaries, but can't imagine where all my storage went otherwise). A further warning: if you use Windows or Ubuntu, expect all your searches to be saved by your OS provider, consider a Mint partition for data hording/mining (or any other Linux system if you are familiar with the OS).

* I should be finishing up my optical drive backup/RAID/reliability fix instead of forum crawling. Should eventually be released as irondisc or pyirondisc, but I'm not sure I'll bother with a windows edition.

[Winter_Wolf]

I think wumpus touches on a key point with organization. But if it's in a sad shape and you have to go through it anyway I would probably start deleting some stuff anyway. I'd start with bookmarks. Either read it immediately or delete it, and you may find a lot of them are no longner valid in any case. I'd probably do photos last, because emails that are beyond a certain age tend to be useless. Unless it involves money or you have actual sentimental attachment to it. Personal and personally taken photos I'd keep until dat corruption destroys it.

[Jimorian]

A better way to deal with it might be to look for stuff you KNOW you want to keep, and make extra effort to move and back it up to specific (multiple) drives. If the detritus you don't take effort to save should then someday succumb to digital decay or a HD crash, you'll be able to shrug it off because you already know the stuff you want to keep is safe.

As others have said, personal pictures and videos are probably going to top this list, followed by personal e-mails with people you care about and financial records. If it just "came from the internet" you probably won't care if it disappears someday.

[Bohandas]

I think I may have a problem.

In all this years I:
-Never deleted an e-mail.
-Saved every single picture and image I found moderately amusing
-Bookmarked every single site I found moderately amusing, with the excuse I would read/look at it later (Never did).

Any tips on how to deal with it?

Microcenter sells flash drives that bottom out at a little under 20¢ per gigabyte