An aside...
"One of the most pro-Palestinian nations in the world is not an Arab or Muslim country[...]Polls show Ireland has the highest support for the Palestinians."
—NPR News
Happy St. Patrick's Day!
🇮🇪 Irish/Palestinian solidarity forever! 🇵🇸
A few days ago, I mentioned the Joy of Datahoarding, and realised that someone might conflate that with hoarding disorder. One of my autistic fixations is organisation and clerical work, which translated quite well to my last job before I had to coronaquit. Outside the professional scope, this means my datahoard is quite well-curated, as in a library or historical archive: apart from just the actual archived data, I have appendices of metadata in RTF format, shortcuts to other relevant folders, tables of contents, and all that kind of stuff. I guess it's not unlike the hoarder who organises everything by material: newsprint over here, magazines over there, fabric in the corner by the chair, cardboard next to the desk. But, I suppose I probably have more in common with a librarian, since I can tell you without even looking at the collection where to find my DVD backups, but I might have to check an appendix someplace to tell you if I have the model of Luigi from Mario Power Tennis.
The way I see it, datahoarding is less about impulsively saving random files from the Internet Archive and more about preserving things that are in danger of going away after a change in leadership someplace. For some people, it is about saving random files or downloading every single webpage they visit. For me, it's about saving things that I would be sad to see disappear from the internet. Sometimes that's a particular revision of a Wikipedia article, but more often than that, it's a DVD box set of something that got batch-deleted from a streaming service 3 months ago, or a 7Zip full of all the known games for the Dunhuang Super A'can. At the same time, I know that my storage capacity is going to run out, sooner rather than later, so I have to prioritise what I put into my datahoard.
And, yes. The sheer preponderance of data that humans have created over the past 50 years staggers the imagination and can turn off a lot of up-and-coming datahoarders and preservationists. First, you're not God. You're not the saviour of all data in the world. Even when you decide on a speciality, you probably won't be able to preserve all information related to it. In my case, old TV programmes and game software. While I would very much like to keep every episode of every TV show, both popular and cult, in my datahoard; the truth of the matter is that I can't afford any more HDDs, so once I've used up my 3.1 terabytes, that's it. As a result, I've decided to specialise in Star Wars, Star Trek, and whatever miscellaneous DVDs I've accumulated since 2002. Game ROMs get stored on DVD-R and flashdrives, so I'm already limited to a maximum filesize of 4.7 GB per archive. Fortunately, that's enough for all the games for every console released from 1977-1996 (with the possible exception of the PlayStation), plus the Game Boy Color and Advance. But, it does mean I have narrow the scope a bit further for the disc-based consoles and Nintendo DS line; which is easy if you go by franchise. Mario, Zelda, James Bond, Rayman, all that stuff. The other thing that I occasionally have trouble remembering is that, I'm not the only one doing this. Simply, if others had not done this exact same work, I would not have been able to start my own archive. If you can find information online, that means someone else is already preserving that data. Quite possibly several someone elses, maybe even hundreds of them.
I said once that there's no such thing as a 100-year medium in the digital age; but, as long as the data is stored on enough computers, there doesn't need to be. If that means encrypting the 7Z file, giving it a misleading name, and putting it on Google Drive, so be it.
--17 March 2024--