The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/ProfessionalHuge5944 on 2024-08-08 01:38:55.
Ovviously the answer to the former is going to be a resounding yes in this sub, but hopefully I can find some better practices to handle duplicated data that I often due unintentionally.
For instance, I might be reading a pdf on my laptop, but also want to browse the pdf of my phone, so I copy the PDF to iCloud. Now I have two PDFs, one in iCloud and another on my laptop.
One day I decide to backup my iCloud and export it all to my external drive. I also backup my laptop home folder and now I have the PDF copied…. Twice.
But I also do this with my phones photos; occasionally Ill export all my photos from my phone and back it up to iTunes, and now I have my photos in two different spots. On my phone and on my PC
Or I take reoccurring backups of my PC every month for a year. One day I reinstall windows. Realistically my last backup should be all I need to reference if I ever need files or configs, but instead I keep 12 instances of my backups “just in case”.
Another example I find is with thumbdrives. Ive copied an encrypted container onto my thumbdrive that contains important documents and all of my notes as I was traveling. When I got back after modifying the encrypted image, I never got to replacing it on my external storage. So I just called it encrypted image2 to denote its newer mod date, and kept the old one with the intention of manually going through it and confirming that its all old data.
Then I never purge anything, but it makes my data unclean, messy, and takes up more space than it should.
Ive also started my hoarding journey with an 8tb drive, and once that got near capacity, I bought a 12tb one, and backed it all up on there.
Well then I found that I store some new data on the 12tb drive, and some on the old one, so now I have two sets of data that need to be merged at some point, but I found Ive created so much more work for mysef
I have come to terms that I yearn for centralized storage as a NAS so I can remove the need to copy files from device to device, and have a single source of truth.
I find the more I backup and hoard, the more useless my data becomes.