How often do you consume the stuff you pirate? How do you avoid "hoarding"?

How do you avoid "hoarding"?

Looks at my 28TB storage array that's 3/4 full...

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

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

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.

There's no reason to avoid hoarding!

Avoid hoarding? I don't understand. My 30 TB file server can be expanded further still.

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

I do not avoid hoarding.

I'm like a dragon with a media treasure stored in high capacity industrial HDDs.

Someday the age of pirates may come to an end, and I want to be prepared.

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

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.

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

I only pirate what I'm about to consume? How is this a problem? Lol

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 have a lot of ebooks that I download for university research, hobby learning and friends who ask for help sourcing books. I put everything in my calibre library, which is great for metadata management (tip: I have it set so new books that I've just imported get a tag of "new", which I remove when I have processed their metadata. This allows me to chip away at ensuring the metadata is correct and good, even if I don't do it at time of import).

Anyway, at one point I found myself at risk of becoming overwhelmed by books, because if I'm wanting to learn some category theory, for example, I'd have multiple books that seem to be relevant. Some of them were recommended by programmers, some of them assume a higher level of maths background knowledge, some of them are more fun to read — once upon a time I might've known which was which, but if there's a significant gap between me downloading stuff and using it (which is often the case, I'm quite opportunistic with book recommendations), I may forget. Making a note of why I downloaded a particular book is something I've been trying to do more, so I can identify the useful things at the right time — the calibre notes field can work for that, but I'm still figuring out how to manage this in a wider sense because I do a lot of reading and it's easy to forget why I'm reading a particular thing. I think I have a calibre plugin to show which things I've read also.

Another related thing is that I will take a cursory look over a book when I download it, and I may delete it and not put it into my calibre library. This feels significant because downloading a book doesn't make it one of my books, 'taking it home' and putting it away on my 'bookshelf' makes it mine. In short, I try to be mindful in my curation activities, recognising that doing it in big clumps with my whole collection doesn't really work and that pruning little and often helps more.

I'm concerned that crackdowns on pirating will come sooner or later. At some point it may become too much of a hassle. So I'm hoarding a lifetime of old movies and games to hold me over.

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

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.

Thanks to MetalJesusRocks, I just grabbed a pack of 7,000 MS DOS game (ExoDos) at almost half a TB

help me

No issue hoarding if you're seeding

Aside from using the word 'consume'...

I don't like hoarding. I become so isolated from choice that I can't enjoy anything I've ever acquired. I've always gotten what I wanted because I wanted it, not because everyone else has gotten it and not because it's just to take up data on my drives. What I have now currently anyways, will sustain me for days to months and getting more of it will not make it better. It'll just bring oversaturation and I'll be too isolated again to bother.

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.

I usually just pirate ebooks, rarely videos or games, so my piracy doesnt take up much space. For videos I just keep em around since I have the space, and if i need to clear space I can just delete something I've already watched. And tbh I don't remember the last time I pirated a game, I don't play games a lot and the ones I do play I own legally lol

Oh I do pirate music too. It's currently not taking up much disk space so I'm not bothered. I would probably just buy another drive if i ran out if music space.

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.

Like others here, I tend to only download when I find (or remember) something I like. Most of the stuff I have was either downloaded to watch or listen to right away. Others are things I watched at some point, or that I just finished and really liked. Especially anything exclusive from the current services since they don't bother to release physical copies (or even legal digital purchases for that matter). When they do release a disc they fuck up getting any money from me by virtue of a HD/4k being only released on DVD.

After seeing the more and more open statements and updated TOS's about losing things if they just decide to ditch an outlet. I finally got around to getting a BDXL drive for my PC and flashed the unlock firmware. So I plan to rip my discs to have all the access I can give myself. Sadly I really really need to commit to getting some actual capacity drives, and move my server to a dedicated PC and not just keep running off my daily PC (though it can handle double duty pretty easy after a couple of years of big upgrades).

Weirdly enough my legal digital libraries tend to have more of an issue with "hoarding" if there are like "Steam sales" on whatever service. Also tend to get things that are part of Movies Anywhere since it is basically the closest thing to having a bit of protection of not losing stuff if any one service closes. Helpful for my current lacking of proper drive space. And I plan to rip those streams once the other PC gets built (or until I build a new main PC and setup the current as dedicated).

I only download what I plan to consume shortly, then delete.

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.

I only dl shit i'm interested in. After watching if it's gonna be rewatched, it goes on the fserve. If not, delete

I sort of regretted downloading massive rom packs for retro consoles because I never actually get round to playing them. it's so hard to settle on one when there's so much choice. But now with the recent crack downs on ROM sites I'm really glad I've preserved them. Hoard away friend!

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

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

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.

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.

I'm mostly hoarding this stuff because I have no fucking clue.

what is the problem?

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 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.

Use a 256 GB ssd Good luck hoarding on that rice grain

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

I format my drives once every couple years. Makes me think real hard about what to keep.

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.