The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/SocietyTomorrow on 2024-10-12 05:13:42.
What is the dumbest thing you've ever done when you had more free space than ideas to use it on? Perhaps it was the first dumb thing you did, or did you upgrade to industrial grade stupid?
I'll start with mine.
I was still really new to datahoarding (circa 2011), and set up my first proper NAS ("ooh, ahh, I have 72TB now!") after having a small mountain of external USB drives. Before I copied everything over, I decided I wanted to try making an archive of all the news I could find in case someone ever wanted to go and start censoring the web someday (foreshadowing?)
I found out about Usenet, which I'd never heard of or used before, because of a site called GigaNews, and said to myself "this sounds like it would be a massive database of all the news in the world!" so of course without doing any research, paid for an account, downloaded the client, set up a directory on my NAS, and immediately clicked "Download All Headers" and happily let it sit for half a day seeing it was grabbing almost 1TB of data (surely that's all the news, after all, it's just news sites)
Half a day obviously was not enough time to download that much with ISPs of the time, of course. I only waited half a day, because that was exactly how long it took for me to have my GigaNews account banned, my internet turned off, and phone calls and later letters sent to me about a few dozen THOUSAND DMCA violations, prompting me to consider torching my house, passport, and hopes for the future, in order to flee to some non extraditing country. It all ended up OK in the end, though I never was able to get back on GigaNews, my ISP changed and my response to the DMCA letter was accepted and no penalties or any other trouble came of it, as I was able to prove I literally just downloaded headers and no actual content so thus didn't actually "steal" any pirated media that may have been there.