I tend to either act as a data hoarder, but most of the time end up being overwhelmed with anxiety about having so much data. Even when I just look at my personal photos, I just feel impeding doom knowing it can only grow and grow, it will never get smaller.
I was wondering if this had a term.
And coming from this question, I am just amazed by this community. What has prompted your interest in data hoarding?
My whife has similar issues with her photos. She has hundreds of thousands. She takes thirty photos of everything “so she can get the right shot,” but can never find the time to sort through them. She keeps running out of space on her phone’s msd card, and just getting a new one and putting the old one away. She six terrabites of mostly photos on my desktop (I gave hear a hard drive in it so she could use it for Photoshop) and none of it is organized.
I can only give you the same advice I give her: you need to curate, and that means you need a system. A good system/protocol/routine should allow you to keep your data sorted and organized, and I strongly suspect that once you know exactly what you have and where it is, you’ll feel a lot better.
If your concern is storage, if you are not consciously data hoarding (in other words, you’re not going out and looking for entire runs of magazines, TV shows etc.); a good curation system will ensure that while yes, your data collection may continue to grow consistently, I doubt very much that it will grow at a rate that makes it unfeasible to manage.
If I might make a suggestion to begin with: /r/datacurator