Data Hoarding?

[Dawn_Falcon]

I needed an email from 2002 this week.

Took me about 5 minutes to find :)

And on searching my computer for file dates…wait, why do I have a load of MP3’s with a date of 2027? Heh.

[Ephraim]

You asked for a psychological perspective, so I’ll give you my take:

Hoarding is a serious problem for some people, and it currently falls under the same category of mental illness as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It’s my understanding that it’s actually one of the most resistant-to-treatment forms of OCD. The main impetus behind the hoarding is a desire to minimize anxiety, whether it comes from the thought that you might need something you’re hoarding one day, or because simply having the items around provides some degree of anxiety relief, or because the thought of discarding an item is too anxiety-provoking to follow-up.

Hoarding as a standalone disorder is not yet in the official diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association (the infamous DSM), but it has been proposed for DSM-V and is one of the new disorders widely considered to be a shoe-in for inclusion. The diagnostic category as currently proposed specifically states that the items have to clutter the “active living areas” (unless others are intervening to clean and prevent the clutter from accumulating), so digital hoarding would not qualify.

But we can apply all the usual rules of a DSM diagnostic criteria to help answer your question about whether or not digital hoarding is as serious as the regular kind:

1. Does it cause significant impairment in your day-to-day living, social relationships, or occupational/scholastic pursuit? Include in this question problems with finances or the law.
2. Is it distressing to you?

If the answer to those is no, then you’re most probably fine. Keep on filling up those hard drives! :D

[BrianRubin]

Heh, the answers are no, so yay! Thanks!

[Omniscia]

@Zylon

So whether or not you keep something should be based on your ability to recall often-cryptic labels and filenames? That’s a terrible suggestion, and you should feel terrible for suggesting it.

If it’s a cryptic label, chances are it’s pr0n.

[Jafisob]

@Brian Rubin

When I was growing up, I lived with a compulsive shopper – my grandmother – who spent all of her money and credit on tons and tons of stuff. If she saw it on the home shopping network, she’d buy it. If she saw something in the store, she’d buy it. Eventually, our house became so cluttered, we had paths in between the stuff to get from one room to another, and one of the four bedrooms was entirely filled with stuff. She eventually couldn’t even sleep on her own bed due to it being covered with stuff, and had to sleep on the couch.

So, of course, being a compulsive person my own self, I emulated these tendencies and became something of a hoarder my own self. For years I hoarded games, movies, toys, books, gadgets and anything else I could afford, to the detriment of my sanity and bank account. Thankfully, a few years ago, I decluttered my apartment and took nearly twenty trash bags full of stuff to Goodwill, and have been relatively clutter free ever since.

However, in thinking on it, I realized my hoarding tendencies have now moved from the physical to the virtual, as I hoard data. For example, I keep nearly every email I get. My primary gmail account has all of its emails going back from 2004. In my phone, I have numbers, emails and addresses for companies I no longer deal with or girls I only went out on one date with and never saw again.

I began wondering, why am I keeping this stuff? Do I REALLY need it? However, is it really a problem since it’s really not taking up any physical space? I know when I decluttered my apartment, it also decluttered my head as well, and my home felt like a much cleaner place to think and be myself in. Would the same thing happen if I “decluttered” my data?

Therefore, I wanted to jump on here and see if anyone had the same issue with hoarding data, what you do to control it, if anything, and why you do it. Hopefully that’ll help me understand it a bit better and form a plan of what to do about it, if anything. Thanks! :)

I understand where you are coming from. Being a pack rat is a bitch. Congrats on getting over the physical side of things. The cost of data pack ratting is low and getting lower. If you segregate your data so you can find the stuff you really need, the cost is relatively small. Don’t worry about it.

On the plus side I just found some interesting wink/wink/nudge/nudge files I had accumlated from the 90s on an old computer I had in a corner. Cough, cough. Time to archive it in a pw protected file.

[dwolfe]

Keep a copy of everything if you can cheaply move it from hard drive to hard drive. Don’t go blowing major wads of cash to archive things that can be trivially redownloaded (i.e. Steam/Impulse/etc downloads? I keep a single hard-drive backup, but no big loss if they vanished as they are very SIMPLE to rediscover, if bandwidth intensive).

I am missing years of e-mails and addresses due to storage/space cost from the 90s, as well as some really interesting early experimental web pages, versions of documents, etc… Versions of indie/roguelike/etc games, sound clips, photos, etc. are trivial storage space requirements, and it’ll be MUCH easier to find something in your personal cache than the entire internet in the future, if you want to find something…

[lordkosc]

I probably have around 80 dvd’s worth of backed up steam games, that I’ve never reinstalled, I just re-download them when I want to play a game.

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