Data Hoarding In Fear

I watched a video today about why a phone is not a camera. The argument is that because they do too many things, they cannot be philosophically pure enough to take on the task of photography. By the end of the video, it was walked back to the idea that as long as the tool inspires you to take photos, it is a camera. More interestingly to me though was the reminder that we are able to hoard tons of data easily in the current age. Storage has been quite cheap and accessible to the average person (especially cloud services like iCloud and Google Drive), which incentivize us to collect more data. In the context of the video, it was discussing photos and videos capturing moments to relive later, but the idea applies to anything digital.

The question posed: "To what end?" For the video host and myself, the justification is that it's being "saved for later." In the case of photos, for family to see in the future. In the case of myself, for me to have a complete history of my computer usage and be able to go back into any moment and pick things up again. The family ideal is a lot more compelling, but even the host admitted to the issue. There is so much data that it's overwhelming to share it all, and we have lost a lot of rituals that would have made selective compilations in formats that were easily accessible.

A custom assembled and configured NAS is not accessible. It barely is for myself after a few months have gone by, and I set the thing up, so why should that be the expectation of others once we are gone. If our infrastructure, then, is for us here and now, then why focus on such an absolute archival record and not on selective moments that we can easily share or look back on?

To be clear, this is not an attack on archival practices. This is targeted at having 30 slight shot and lighting variations of an image while trying to capture a moment, and not deleting most of them right away. And it's at holding on to every random VM I made trying to figure out my dotfiles for i3 in middle school. I don't use them. Even when that was something I was doing, I never actually turned on one of those discarded VMs again. Besides, things continue to change. What was once an up-to-date system that I tinkered with to learn pfSense, is now an obsolete machine that would be better off starting from scratch anyways.

A lot of time for me recently has been spent trying to figure out how to organize all my data across various machines. I'm coming to the realization that it's the wrong question. The real question is, "what is no longer useful?" Old installer that no longer receive updates for random bits of tech I have lying around? Useful. Who knows if the mirror is going to be up in a decade. That collection of VMs, or tens of installers of different versions of Firefox? Not useful. I never open them, and if I did they would be too obsolete to care about. If I was a browser nerd, maybe it would be different, but I'm not.

School has not been kind to my drives either, and I have a new kind of guilt with those files. While some students have collections of e-books and term papers, I have hundreds of GB-sized 3D files. A lot of which are in a proprietary format requiring a multi-thousand dollar software subscription to be useful again. Will I ever need them again? No. But I will feel like my education was a waste if they were lost. I think a story my dad told me about his mom burning his college math notes without telling him lives front and center in my mind for these situations.

I think the video was a good reminder, though, and I already started the deletion process a while back. I just need to continue. What I thought was going to feel bad ended up feeling liberating. I finally had drive space back which allowed me to do work and create. I'm trying best to hold onto that feeling going forward and to live within my current storage limitations. I also like the idea of making projects out of the moments that I'm trying to remember by holding onto this data. Maybe a graphic or something I can print out. But it should contain a curated phase, not every specific moment. One thing at a time, though. For now, data reduction.

Created: 2026-09-18