All the time. It’s my primary source of entertainment media. And why would I want to avoid hoarding? Hoarding is the goal.

If i need something, i go look for it, download it and keep it seeding until i have no more space on my hard drive. I rarely download things i don‘t actually need or want at the moment.

I watch movies and series once, and keep them on my hard drive until I’m running out of space, then delete from the oldest to newest. Music I’ll consume very regularly.

Outside of a small handful, I don’t rewatch movies and feel no drive to keep my own copies. I keep a “to watch” list in Letterbox’d and that is excessively long, but I rarely have more than a couple dozen movies downloaded from that list at any given time. That’s how I do books too, long “to read” list but actually downloaded, not much.

Music is a different story. I can pull up the playlist for the first mixed CD I burned in middle school and everything since then.

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

My goal is to store everything, that way I have no dependence on remote media

Haha, good question. You're not alone with that. I suppose you just clean up once a year. Like you're supposed to do with your wardrobe, or that one drawer in the kitchen...

A) Almost every day. I have a constant backlog/watchlist but it’s small and fairly constant.

B) Once or twice a year I go over my media and delete movies or shows that I’m definitely not watching again. I am hoarding, though only the good stuff. Nothing wrong with that.

Avoid hoarding? Let’s just say I bring a real “gotta catch em all” energy to the trackers.

How do you avoid “hoarding”? Looks at my 28TB storage array that’s 3/4 full…

There’s no reason to avoid hoarding!

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.

Do you need the space? If not who cares.

Personally I run a media service for friends and family. I’m about to bring another 100tb online because we are running low on storage. Am I holding or just running a rack of servers in my basement?

Storage is cheap. There’s no reason to delete content.

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.

I only pirate TV/movies, and since I never know what I’ll feel like watching it’s pretty easy to just hoard it. Takes a long time to fill up drives so adding a 16TB drive once a year or two is pretty manageable.

But tbh the main reason I hoard them and keep my Plex library full is simply to keep view stats. Prior to Plex I was constantly plagued by “have I seen this” or “what was that movie I liked 10 years ago?”. But not anymore!

Also, when the zombie apocalypse happens I’ll finally have time to rewatch Breaking Bad so I need an offline copy just in case.

I try to only grab the stuff someone in the house wants to watch.

If my drives ever fill up, I’ll either expand or delete things I know we’ll never watch again.

I just grabbed a pack of 7,000 MS DOS game (ExoDos)

help me

I mostly only load TV shows and movies. At least those are by large the biggest part in terms of storage taken. Well… I only load stuff that I actually want to watch. I also load some stuff for friends, but it has to be decent quality and be not totally niche (aka I’m eventually watching it, or other friends)

I archive, never delete or stop seeding. I would just delete when you need space if you don’t want to buy drives.

All the few shows/movies on my hard drive I end up watching when I get around to it and feel like watching. Though, recently, there have been 3 specific cartoons I’ve been watching a lot more of due to not feeling like watching other shows.

So far, the only things I have got that were bad quality and unwatchable were 2 cartoons. One you could easily tell it was upscaled and just looked a bit off, making it feel uncomfortable for me to watch and enjoy. The other, first episode in and they cut the theme song and had the channel watermark, for a show that’s a few decades, so I didn’t bother checking the other episodes and just deleted it. With the first show, I looked immediately because there was a specific episode I needed to check, but the other, it took me over a half a year to finally check to see how good quality it is/was.

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.

How do you avoid "hoarding"?

I dont. Hard drives are increasingly cheap/large. I have to really dislike something to delete it. I have a fair amount of content that I don't really plan on watching again, but someone I know might like it so i just leave it typically.

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 do I avoid Hoarding? Well I have a total of 2.75tb of space, so when it gets a bit full I go through and delete shit we watched already so I have space for more stuff

I only pirate music and books anymore. I do consume it all. Well, most of it. Sometimes I’ll download a series of books and not jive with the first one or something. The music always gets listened to. More than once, too! I’m easy to please. Or I have good taste.

who avoids hoarding? we are saving it for the future.

Often I download just to seed but only when I know the uploaders

I only get the stuff i want to watch/play.