For anyone that’s ever seen an episode of Hoarders, you know that hoarding is bad because it can lead to destructive habits that can significantly decrease the quality of life.
Data hoarding is not the same as regular hoarding because you’re dealing with data and not physical items. And there are some out there who never delete anything. Some keep every email. Some have 50+ distributions of Linux downloaded but don’t use any of them. Some have so many movies downloaded that if you added up all the hours it would take 6 solid months without interruption to watch them all – were that humanly possible.
But when does data hoarding become an actual problem? That I can answer. It’s a problem if you have useless multiple copies of the same thing.
Example: A while back you bought a game on DVD. You copy that DVD to an ISO and then burn another disc of it. Now you have 3 copies. Later on you buy a flash stick and then copy the ISO again to the stick for a total of 4 copies, but don’t toss out that copied disc and don’t delete the ISO off the hard drive. Now you’re hoarding because you have the original, a disc copy, a USB stick copy and a hard drive copy. The disc copy at that point isn’t necessary and you should break out the scissors, chop the disc up (or run through a shredder that ‘eats’ discs appropriately) and get rid of it, and you should find the ISO on your hard drive, mash the delete key and be done with it.
You really know you’re data hoarding if using the above example you went to delete the ISO off the hard drive and actually got nervous about it – even though you have 3 other copies. That’s a tiny anxiety attack right there, and if in your mind you say, "Well.. I might need this ISO.." Stop. Just stop. You’re a data hoarder. Get rid of the stupid file.
Having the original and a copy is OK. Transitioning copies of backups from one media type to the next as time goes on is OK to keep the data accessible as technologies progress. Keeping useless redundant copies that aren’t originals however? Bad.
If you keep hanging on to those redundant copies of stuff, data hoarding starts turning into real-life hoarding. Soon enough you have piles of worthless discs, USB sticks and maybe even hard drives that have nothing on them but crap you already have copied elsewhere.
It is true that I as well as many others have told you to backup, backup, backup – but if you start getting obsessive about redundant copies of data that aren’t originals, well.. that’s a problem and you need to fix it. Delete the worthless copies of stuff off your hard drive(s) and get rid of those discs where you already moved the data elsewhere.
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Hi Rich,
Guilty as charged, well in a smaller way:
2 ea 1 TB hard drives – mirrored, a little over 200 GB open space.
True there are some double copies ISO of cd/dvd’s there, should get rid of them, maybe do some house cleaning…
Two copies of every digital photo the wife has taken (too scared to delete any of those…)
The sad thing is I have around ten usb drives that are bootable with the same thing on them, can’t seem to format them, may need one in an emergency….
Seems my delete key is broken.
I think the closest I get is thus:
All of my music is stored on my PC, laptop and Archos 70. The former because I use it most, the latter two for out and about and as back up in case one of the 3 should fail. Nothing like a bit of double redundancy.
Although the laptop is likely to get an SSD if I upgrade the PC’s boot drive to a SATA III flavoured one; that will remove the laptop from having enough room for said music although I suspect the current 500gb drive in it will be housed and used with music on. Considering it’s the only thing I actually back up when I have most of it on CD I wonder why I have 3 copies.
The system you developed for having copies of your music everywhere for listening exists because at present there’s no effective cloud solution you could use otherwise, so I technically don’t qualify that as data hoarding.
You could use SkyDrive (allows for 50GB free), but the problem is you couldn’t play those files through your music players of choice without downloading the entire file each time first, so that wouldn’t work. Unfortunately what you have now is the most effective solution. Again, not a hoard. You use what you use because you have no other good options.
Also guilty of some of it. But this is nothing like hoarding, more of an issue of not cleaning up. It is too easy to download another copy of something rather than searching through the hard drives or CDs.
I do see some of the results of hoarding tendencies with my SO hoarder. All 1gb of emails that require 2 CDs to archive while about 500mb from one source have never been opened. At one point there were 2100 messages in the inbox which I considered a record until I hit a customer’s machine with 2500.
I use the email clutter problem as an opportunity to educate people about MS default settings and how they can be changed to bring order.
In today’s webmail (local is a different story) we’re all told to never delete anything, so we don’t. There are Gmail users that exist with 50,000+ emails stored within the Gmail system. I don’t even want to know how long it would even take to retrieve the IMAP headers (never mind the full message bodies) for accounts like that.
My personal email account has mails going all the way back to 2000. All folders combined totals over 24,000 emails – and that’s *after* I cleaned out all the useless crap.
Total size is over 2GB.
Email clutter isn’t really a problem unless you have useless redundant copies.
Interesting that you write this article at this point: I just deleted 150 gigs of crap and overly-copied stuff this last week. – Great minds think alike.
Data hoarding is truly bad when you have multiple copies of both software programs and data files and still can’t find what you’re looking for because it’s not organized to be easily searched and there’s just too much of it to wade through…
Sorry, I may not agree with some of the points. In fact, duplicate copies are important. I had some real experience which I found duplicate copies indeed necessary.
Usually, I have data on 2 harddisks (original and external) and 1 copy on DVD or 2 copies on DVD if the data is really important.
Case 1:
There was computer virus, my original harddisk messed up, the data in original harddisk had been removed and the harddisk was infected. Then I checked with the scanning virus function of the anti-virus software and assumed all the virus had been cleared, However, the anti-virus program could not remove the virus completely. I didn’t know because it didn’t say there was virus in the system anymore. When I plugged in usb external hard disk, it messed up too. BUT LUCKILY, i had a DVD, since it has read-only property, the computer virus would not infect DVD, all my data can be recovered after reinstallation of the operating system.
Case 2:
DVD has durability problems, after some years, you may not able to read the data, so the copies in harddisk help this case.
OR
Now, you may imagine a new situation. let’s combine my Case 1 and Case 2, there is computer virus, and your original and external harddisk mess up, if you only got one copy on DVD, and due to the durability problem, you cannot read that DVD, then 2nd copy on DVD helps you.
Of course, you may say the probabiltiy may not be that high, but you can see there is a risk. I recommend if the data is really important, you should have at least 2 sets on harddisk and 2 sets on DVD or we called optical media.
If you want a fast recovery, more secure and faster solution is to have 3 sets on harddisk and 2 sets on DVD. WHY? Because, as continue with my previous mentioned case, those two harddisks mess up and 1 DVD is not working and only left 1 copy on other DVD, but you know, optical media has fewer capacity, we may need to spread through several discs. It is inconvenient to recover the data from several discs. If we have got the 3rd copy on harddisk. We can format the two infected harddisks and directly copy from the 3rd harddisk which results a faster recovery time.
In my opinion, the main problem of data hoarding is not just the number of copies you make, of course if duplicating many many copies is a problem. I think the main problem is the content of the data. My suggestion is to unclutter your data in the harddisk, some data is not necessary, you can get from google search very easily, e.g to me wallpaper is not so important, I don’t have to save many sets of wallpaper in my harddisk, I just use one wallpaper at a time.
When you do backup, you should consider some factors like, the cost (e.g the time used for backup and recovery), the durablility of the media for backup.
But really thanks for raising the concerns of data hoarding, it is a problem to individuals as well as corporate companies. Sorry for the long comment. Have a nice day ^_^