Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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 archive, never delete or stop seeding. I would just delete when you need space if you don't want to buy drives.

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 only dl shit i'm interested in. After watching if it's gonna be rewatched, it goes on the fserve. If not, delete

I mostly only load TV shows and movies. At least those are by large the biggest part in terms of storage taken. Well.. I only load stuff that I actually want to watch. I also load some stuff for friends, but it has to be decent quality and be not totally niche (aka I'm eventually watching it, or other friends)

I try to only grab the stuff someone in the house wants to watch.

If my drives ever fill up, I’ll either expand or delete things I know we’ll never watch again.

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

I'm mostly hoarding this stuff because I have no fucking clue.

what is the problem?

I only download what I plan to consume shortly, then delete.

Use a 256 GB ssd Good luck hoarding on that rice grain

I just watch and delete because I don't ever really watch anything more than a few times anyways.

The only kind of stuff I've ever made backups of is dev software and old keygens because . well - that kind of stuff disappears too easily with the new&shiny fad.

What I do is sort the directories and files by size and go largest to smallest. Based on the likely distribution of files sizes, 20% of your files and/or directories will account for 80% of the hard drive space. I usually then choose candidates for deletion and evaluate them, deleting them on the spot or skipping them for this time. I do this until I get the space reduction I want or until I'm sure that I want to keep what is in the largest 20%. After I reach one of the two states: top 20% of files/directories are keepers or I deleted down X GB. This method can be done with any sorting method. For example, by play count or by date added, old to new. Keep going until the top 20% are keepers. The same distribution is likely to apply across all vertical data labels so the filter is generically usable in lots of situations. For example, 20% of car drivers likely get 80% of speeding tickets. We could reduce speeding by 80% by speed limiting these drivers' cars or by revoking their drivers licenses. Another example is memory hogs in a computer system. The top 20% of memory hogging programs likely account for 80% of used memory in a system. This distribution is called the Pareto principle. The principle is an example of a power law.

Do you need the space? If not who cares.

Personally I run a media service for friends and family. I'm about to bring another 100tb online because we are running low on storage. Am I holding or just running a rack of servers in my basement?

I format my drives once every couple years. Makes me think real hard about what to keep.