Asking mostly because I have fuckloads of video courses, plus a number of movies, that I have yet to even check if the content is as good as their titles imply and I really feel like I’m mostly hoarding this stuff because I have no fucking clue.
Thanks to MetalJesusRocks, I just grabbed a pack of 7,000 MS DOS game (ExoDos) at almost half a TB
help me
Definitely not investigating this when I get home
Nope. Definitely not. Wink
That’s like 70 MB per game unless my napkin math is off by a few 0s. Sounds rather large for MS DOS games?
I suspect a number of the larger ones are CD games with multimedia (video) experience. I mean, the original Command and Conquer used 2 CDs
Right, I totally forgot about games on CD!
Correct many are covered by…E. Ese (sound it out)
Use a 256 GB ssd Good luck hoarding on that rice grain
And this is why I consider SSDs to be a downgrade compared to HDDs lol
I’m concerned that crackdowns on pirating will come sooner or later. At some point it may become too much of a hassle. So I’m hoarding a lifetime of old movies and games to hold me over.
Just keep seeding the torrents. As long as the torrents for stuff is healthy, how could it be cracked down?
Enough countries ban torrenting so you cannot even uses vpn to get around it.
Why would any country ban torrenting? Torrenting isn’t illegal, downloading and distributing copyrighted works is
What I mean is what is already happening in some countries, that is having laws that makes extra easy for copyright lawers to sue anyone using torrent for sharing their IP.
How do they do that?
Ask Germany. Torrenting without VPN is almost imposible, you’ll get sued by copyright lawyers.
Exactly, so you can use a VPN to get around that.
You use a vpn to other country without that ban. Once enough countries apply that ban. Where are you going to VPN to?
There’s no reason to avoid hoarding!
I sort of regretted downloading massive rom packs for retro consoles because I never actually get round to playing them. it’s so hard to settle on one when there’s so much choice. But now with the recent crack downs on ROM sites I’m really glad I’ve preserved them. Hoard away friend!
I’ve done that with the Sharp X68000, I’ve downloaded the entire collection it has (~18GB). Do I know Japanese? No. Have I even checked if an emulator works with them? Also no. But it’s there
18gb is nothing at the end of the day. Roms are small. It’s the same thing with my 50gib font collection, its a lot of fonts, but little file size
deleted by creator
I downloaded the entire SNES catalogue when I was overseas; so glad I did that then as it’s become much more difficult over the past few years.
II recently tried to download ISOs of my PS1 & 2 collections so that I could play them on my Steam Deck, and found out that at it’s actually a lot faster and easier just to to them myself - as whatever sources I can find are either dead links, or download so slowly that the connection is likely to time out before the download completes.
Roms don’t count!
Storage is cheap. There’s no reason to delete content.
depends on what job are you working
And where in the world you live.
I got a friend in Australia with a pretty similar storage setup to me, but he’s paid about 1.5x as much as I did in the UK.
Only reason I delete content is when I upgrade. Like replacing a low resolution version of show with a higher one. Still, I keep immutable “snapshots” of my entire media folder so even after deleting something, It’ll stick around for at least 6 months in case I need to restore it.
Same deal, got a full 3-2-1 backup of all my data! Easy to recover if I make a mistake but even easier to replace with
higher qualitynewer builds of Linux isos.
deleted by creator
My goal is to store everything, that way I have no dependence on remote media
Home datacentre 😋
Well yes, but also actual DC space lol
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.
Aside from using the word ‘consume’…
I don’t like hoarding. I become so isolated from choice that I can’t enjoy anything I’ve ever acquired. I’ve always gotten what I wanted because I wanted it, not because everyone else has gotten it and not because it’s just to take up data on my drives. What I have now currently anyways, will sustain me for days to months and getting more of it will not make it better. It’ll just bring oversaturation and I’ll be too isolated again to bother.
I have two servers, a >100TB rack-mounted Supermicro archive that doesn’t get fired up often, and an Intel NUC that runs 24/7 but only draws 5W at idle. The NUC with its mere 4TB SSD is only for content I’m actively watching which gets deleted immediately afterwards. Running just the Supermicro made more sense when I had a terrible internet connection and had to wait for everything but I moved to an area with 1Gb+ connectivity a few years ago and subsequently needed to save on energy costs.
I feel like the real question you want to ask yourself is, “how likely is it that this particular content will still be available on Usenet/torrents in a few years?” Some stuff is much more niche and rare while other movies/shows each have over a dozen redundant releases, at least a few of which will more or less always be available somewhere. To put things in perspective, it also helps to do an analysis of how much you’re spending each month in order to avoid what you would be paying in streaming and licensing costs, including hardware, power, and connectivity. If that ratio gets too high then it’s time to scale back.
how likely is it that this particular content will still be available on Usenet/torrents in a few years?
I’ve had quite a bit of trouble finding the old Rome Total War some time ago, before the remaster was released. I’ve took the chance to get Medieval 2 as well. Both are sitting on my hard drive, guess they’re worth keeping for longer
who avoids hoarding? we are saving it for the future.
Exactly! I assume that my little 4tb external drive full of movies will one day be the only usable relic discovered of our civilization, so I must plan accordingly lol
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 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
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.
