I heard in passing on Tumblr a couple days ago that the cartoon website I used to go to got shut down. I didn't much care, I stopped going there in 2023 because they changed their website from free access with ads (that I would block and click on with AdNauseam) to private invitation only. That's really stupid. The only reason I could think of for them doing that, apart from sheer incompetence, is if they were compiling a list of IP addresses for some police agency. They were ASKING to be shut down.
Still, I never bothered to seek out an alternative, because I was Done, with a capital D, downloading cartoons an episode at a time and I wasn't interested in torrenting. Plus, I had all the cartoons I watched as a kid and a few I didn't, and decided my collection was complete. Video files of any format are absolutely huge files, without exception. Between the MP4's I've downloaded from various sources over the years and the MKV backups of my DVD collection, I've used 3/4 of my available storage space. I had to get a whole separate HDD just for video so I could still hoard other data on my main disk.
Assuming storage space was no object, there are several cartoons I wish I'd archived at the time, but the opportunity has passed. Hey Arnold! is presently at the top of that list. I watched the odd episode here and there when I was a kid and there wasn't something more interesting on another channel, and I got through most of the programme on Hulu until I realised I was just using it as a surrogate for the 6 or 7 cartoons I wished I was watching instead. I spoke of the "Evil, Manipulative Fat Kid" syndrome on the SpongeBob SquarePants video log in reference to Bubble Bass from "Pickles"; well, Hey Arnold takes it a step further and also makes the evil, manipulative fat kid Jewish; to say nothing about Gerald, the token Black kid. Yes, it has faults, but the art style and music score and writing are unrivalled in their quality.
Another regret that springs to mind is The Joy of Painting. For about 6 months in 2015, the complete programme of The Joy of Painting was available on the Internet Archive. That was a bit before I started datahoarding, though— I decided it would take too much time and too much physical storage to download it. I stupidly believed it would be there for a grand long while... how little did I know. January 2016, they started uploading The Joy of Painting to YouTube, DMCA'd the Archive version, and I lost my chance. Ever since then, I've made periodic searches for the show, hoping that someone returned the show to the Archive in the shadows, but so far, nothing. Losing Joy of Painting was the reason I downloaded the entire Red Green Show from there when I found it back in September and M*A*S*H when I found it there 3 days ago. Of course, I have quite a bit more storage space now than I did in 2015, so that helps. I may not have all that I want, but it's adequate for several hundred more MP4's or about 3 dozen MKV's. Once it's gone, though... I can't afford another HDD, and as you might imagine, removeable computer storage was one of the first things to have its price jacked up in 2021. A 1 terabyte HDD costs now what a 2 terabyte HDD cost when I got my last one in 2019.