Data Hoarding Debate

I totally understand the desire to keep a record of the past, and space is cheap so why not. I used to be a big "digital hoarder", virtually never deleting anything that might be a bit interesting. But a couple years back I deleted most, though not all of the "archive" of past me. It was a great decision that I don't regret. The important things you did will still surface from time to time. It's also always cool to accidentally find a photobucket or google docs acco

Your information lasting forever can be an issue when it's controlled by companies who exploit your data (and even short term that data can be exploited). If it's under your control than it can be quite useful. I can only see upsides to having old files and info; it is unlike too many objects which can cause issues in the physical world. That email I wrote 30 years ago in high school does no harm just sitting taking a few bytes of space. But if one day I wonder when I first read a memo

Yeah I also want to know this, I used to write diaries for years and cherish it, thought I would look back my life or extract something meaningful out of it, turns out I very rarely look at it.Same goes to old project archives, emails, I have both HDD and S3 Glacier for them, but so far I have never looked at them at all, for 10 years, And I doubt I will look at them in another 10 years.I am beginning to thinking Letting past go and You aren't gonna need it philosophy towards such thi

I don't understand the negativity the article associates with "hoarding" data.It is the nature of the internet that any content or website you see can disappear at any moment without a prior warning or an explanation. From an author deleting their earlier work they were later dissatisfied with, to copyright claims, to people losing interest in their hobby project, to site owner forgetting to extend their domain, to website becoming impossible to find in search engines.It alw

I wonder - looking at the data they have now - how much of the data stored has never been used by ordinary users. There's got to be a lot of cruft that could be trimmed. In the past people would keep letters they felt were important. Now, with the network it's hard to tell what's important, a user might prune items that other users want to keep or might prune items that later become more important. Is there really enough value in keeping everything.I'm a consumate hoarder,

My thinking is that you just don't know what will be important to you in the future. Those photos probably weren't that important to you when they were first taken, but now they are. I would advise that everyone store even the seemingly most trivial piece of data. There could be an algorithm in the future for which that is the missing key. I trust in our inability to predict the future more than our ability to predict it.

Keeping old stuff is hard af in a internet run by walled gardens

Not only that, but I also wonder if we're overestimating the value of keeping all of this data around. Who's going to have the time to search and curate these mountains of information when we're generating tons more of it every day? I imagine the ideal goal is to allow future historians to learn about our past selves, but I think there's a tipping point where only those with lots of resources can afford to meaningfully consume it. Those typically are wealthy companies or indi

Recording isn't knowing but archiving is better than losing.As an exercise, look back at bookmarks that are 5+ years old. How many of them still load? Look back at your history of liked videos on YouTube. How many of them have been deleted?

Indeed. Of all the information I'm inadvertently exposed during the day, there's maybe 1 piece that's worth remembering tomorrow - maybe. I bet I'm with the absolute majority in this case as well.In fact I've started the habit of deleting everything after a period of inactivity - be it computer history or social history - because it's either important and saved properly or it's not.Certainly the world wouldn't loose heritage if random blogs, facebook