As I mentioned yesterday, I’m a bit of a digital hoarder. I have music, movies, TV shows and random other things just cluttering my hard drive.

Lately I’ve been trying to purge, or burn, but I’m not moving fast enough and it’s piling up.

Let’s give you an example:

TV Shows: 1,129 files or 340Gigs

Movies:238 files or 209Gigs

Music:20,499 files or 144Gigs

So, that’s 693Gigs of digital media…oh, not including pictures. But those are scattered around the drives, so I don’t feel like counting those.(mental note, organize those!)

And that’s just files on the computer, not including anything already burned off to DVD.

So yea, it’s time to burn and purge.

Purging can be easy, as it’s just deleting files. Burning is a little more time consuming, and I have to make decisions on what to burn and what can just be purged.

But how did I get here?

In terms of the downloads, I blame bittorrent. I never really got into Napster as I found it very annoying to use. And single file downloading was just too tedious. Bittorrent though, super easy. And it allowed for larger file downloads. So now it wasn’t song-by-song, it was CD-by-CD, or discography-by-discography! Oh how the hard drive(s) filled up.

There were also certain time frames when my downloading was at it’s highest. The first was when I was a DJ. I had a lot of stuff, but always needed more and more. I remember downloading well over 150 gigs in one month, and I suspect the majority of that was MP3.

The next push was when Tara and I didn’t have cable. So it was all the downloaded shows we could get. That worked to a point, as we were on Rogers at the time and they had a cap. But when we moved to Primus(no cap), well, that all changed

Again, it was hundreds of gigs per month, and it was all stored locally.

But we have cable now, I’m no longer a DJ, so my downloads have diminished a great deal. But it’s not like I got rid of anything. That’s the second part of hoarding. The first is that you get the stuff(generally because you can), the second is that it never goes anywhere.

I have a dedicated directory of things I need to burn off, and I still haven’t. Mostly because it takes time, also because I currently have enough drive space!

So I’m a digital hoarder. Today I did try and purge, but mostly moved stuff around somewhat.

That’s another problem. I have three drives(that aren’t the c drive) and they all have…stuff on them. D is for storage(which makes no sense really). E is for temp stuff because the drive might be faulty. F is for user stuff, like pictures and other music. But in all of that, there are random backups from other computers, from other reinstalls, from days gone by that I don’t even remember. Our picture directory, while initially a good attempt to have all the pics in one place, is full of duplicates and random images that probably don’t even need to be there. But, there are 13 thousand of them. Yes, 13 thousand! That’s a lot to go through. And that assumes that’s from all the computers in the house, and I know for sure it’s not

But I chip away at it. I think I’ve got it to a point where I’m purging/burning more than I’m adding. At least for tv/movies/music. My next big task is pictures. That’ll take a little while, but will be soooo worth it.

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Filed under: Movies,Music,NaBloPoMo - @ November 17, 2011 10:54 pm