When does ‘digital hoarding’ become a problem?
Yesterday, after I had installed Fedora 13 and restored what I thought was all the important files, I started going through my files. I discovered that I a lot of files that, I have told myself, might be useful to have someday. A lot of them has a very personal and nostalgic meaning, as old games that I like playing on occasion when I want to walk down memory lane. Other files, that might be useful “someday”, are anything from job applications to old documents that might be a bit difficult to get your hands on now.
It is really not a big deal for most people if you are a digital hoarder, because even if the hoarding and organisation of the files might be time-wasting, digital files take up less space and are a lot more easily organised than physical objects.
Yet it can be annoying when you do a full system upgrade and restore, as you might end up scratching your head wondering what those folders contain and what that odd file name means.
I spent some time last night organising my Dropbox, making it more neat; yet I have a lot of other folders that needs to be cleaned out and organised.
What I will try to do is the creat a “dump folder” on one of my external HDDs where I can just dump certain files that “might be useful someday” and become more organised with the files I actually use and have a use for daily.
Looking back when I got my first computer I can remember being excited about getting a HDD twice the size of my friend. I felt I had endless possibilities with such a large HDD. Now 40MB is nothing.
I guess that is a general human trait; the more room we have, physical or non-physical, the more we like to hoard.
