I am a digital hoarder. Group therapy or methodologies welcome
April 13, 2022 8:51 AM Subscribe
I have 193/218gb of storage in my Google drive. Most of it is email, a third is photos, and the rest is ebooks and other files. I show all the signs of a classic hoarder, except my physical hoarding is limited to books and board games. I really need a method for culling my unneeded photos (they are all backed up on Flickr) or fixing my brain so I don't hold onto everything, or a system for reducing my digital tottering towers of the equivalent of old newspapers.
I also have a Dropbox account. And work provides me with a hefty Microsoft Onedrive account. And I have a one terabyte SSD sitting on my desk, but I've had so many drives fail that I don't trust it. I also have been diagnosed with ADHD and there's probably a little autism in the mix.
Help me Obi-wan.
I also have a Dropbox account. And work provides me with a hefty Microsoft Onedrive account. And I have a one terabyte SSD sitting on my desk, but I've had so many drives fail that I don't trust it. I also have been diagnosed with ADHD and there's probably a little autism in the mix.
Help me Obi-wan.
On the ebooks front, at least, are they a bunch of PDFs & mobi/epub files in folders? If so, Calibre might help with getting them organized & de-duplicated.
This'd be the tactic I'd take for as many other categories as possible. If you feel like they're organized, that might free up some mental space for culling that old 2nd edition GURPS splatbook PDF you haven't so much as looked at in the better part of a decade. (speaking from experience)
Doing so would require using the SSD, and then replicating from there to Google Drive (or Backblaze, or elsewhere); but that's not a bad way to go in general. Two is one and one is none, after all.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:50 AM on April 13, 2022
This'd be the tactic I'd take for as many other categories as possible. If you feel like they're organized, that might free up some mental space for culling that old 2nd edition GURPS splatbook PDF you haven't so much as looked at in the better part of a decade. (speaking from experience)
Doing so would require using the SSD, and then replicating from there to Google Drive (or Backblaze, or elsewhere); but that's not a bad way to go in general. Two is one and one is none, after all.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:50 AM on April 13, 2022
That doesn't sound like a lot of data. If you enjoy keeping it and organizing it, you can do that for next to no cost in terms of money or physical space, and think of it as a hobby instead of a problem.
To cull redundant photos from email records, you can search gmail for:
filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR png)
To cull redundant ebooks, you can search for them on The Internet Archive and quickly find that there is no need to keep a copy of anything except recent releases you are currently reading. I've heard of someone printing dollhouse-sized covers of ebooks they had finished.
To sort redundant photos in Google drive, you can treat it like a household task such as laundry, and do it for an hour every week or so. This is hard with ADHD but easier with some music on.
posted by Phssthpok at 9:58 AM on April 13, 2022 [6 favorites]
To cull redundant photos from email records, you can search gmail for:
filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR png)
To cull redundant ebooks, you can search for them on The Internet Archive and quickly find that there is no need to keep a copy of anything except recent releases you are currently reading. I've heard of someone printing dollhouse-sized covers of ebooks they had finished.
To sort redundant photos in Google drive, you can treat it like a household task such as laundry, and do it for an hour every week or so. This is hard with ADHD but easier with some music on.
posted by Phssthpok at 9:58 AM on April 13, 2022 [6 favorites]
1. Anything not measured in multiple terabytes does not count as "digital hoarding". I say this as someone who has this much, a fellow sufferer much farther gone.
2. I also use Flickr as a backup tool for some of my photos. I've done this since '04, and have never lost any data. I would say you have two options here: A) obv., just cull everything from Drive; B) Over the course of a few months, fix your preferred drink, sit down and scroll through/find/search for the really important stuff to leave in backup, culling as you go. I was forced to do the latter last year to free up space, and managed to do so over the course of about 3 weeks spending a little time each day, pretty stress-free.
I haven't had issues w/SSD failure (I do replace them every 5 years or so), but this is my system:
1. Critical stuff gets backed up to SSD, which is in turn backed up on a 2nd drive. This happens monthly (I set a calendar alert). Some of this stuff used to have a tertiary backup on Drive, but most of that has been culled due to space, as I noted above. Some still lives on Flickr for this reason.
2. Photos and other documents awaiting backup sit in a dedicated folder on my desktop.
3. Working documents (articles being written, management files for a nonprofit I help run, etc.) live in Drive. Some of these, once they become archival, move over to the SSDs.
Unless I think there is a strong likelihood that something will have archival, sentimental, or functional value in the future, I do not keep it, or I bundle "maybe" stuff together, compress it, and add it to a "maybe" folder on the SSDs that I periodically look at (most of that ends up being pitched). I give everything clear, descriptive, human-readable file names to make managing it all easier.
The bottom line here is: you have to mindfully and regularly make a personal decision about where this threshold is for you + apply it. For me, it still means multiple terabytes of data that I'm wrangling, for you, it sounds like less is ideal. But set up some basic criteria for you and a system to contain what meets them, and use it.
Having a protocol in place in itself - at least for me - lowers the stress of dealing with it and, over time, will make it a lot easier to go back and do culls, migrations, and to find and use what you've kept.
posted by ryanshepard at 10:04 AM on April 13, 2022 [5 favorites]
2. I also use Flickr as a backup tool for some of my photos. I've done this since '04, and have never lost any data. I would say you have two options here: A) obv., just cull everything from Drive; B) Over the course of a few months, fix your preferred drink, sit down and scroll through/find/search for the really important stuff to leave in backup, culling as you go. I was forced to do the latter last year to free up space, and managed to do so over the course of about 3 weeks spending a little time each day, pretty stress-free.
I haven't had issues w/SSD failure (I do replace them every 5 years or so), but this is my system:
1. Critical stuff gets backed up to SSD, which is in turn backed up on a 2nd drive. This happens monthly (I set a calendar alert). Some of this stuff used to have a tertiary backup on Drive, but most of that has been culled due to space, as I noted above. Some still lives on Flickr for this reason.
2. Photos and other documents awaiting backup sit in a dedicated folder on my desktop.
3. Working documents (articles being written, management files for a nonprofit I help run, etc.) live in Drive. Some of these, once they become archival, move over to the SSDs.
Unless I think there is a strong likelihood that something will have archival, sentimental, or functional value in the future, I do not keep it, or I bundle "maybe" stuff together, compress it, and add it to a "maybe" folder on the SSDs that I periodically look at (most of that ends up being pitched). I give everything clear, descriptive, human-readable file names to make managing it all easier.
The bottom line here is: you have to mindfully and regularly make a personal decision about where this threshold is for you + apply it. For me, it still means multiple terabytes of data that I'm wrangling, for you, it sounds like less is ideal. But set up some basic criteria for you and a system to contain what meets them, and use it.
Having a protocol in place in itself - at least for me - lowers the stress of dealing with it and, over time, will make it a lot easier to go back and do culls, migrations, and to find and use what you've kept.
posted by ryanshepard at 10:04 AM on April 13, 2022 [5 favorites]
Response by poster: I think I need to use Zotero to make lists of books I want to read associated with different projects, and then borrow those books when I actually need them.
My anxiety about my Google storage is I don't want to pay for the next tier of service.
I love being able to search my email, but I am considering extracting letters to friends and turning them into journal entries in Obsidian.
With Google photos, a lot of them are just uninteresting, and they show up on our TV screensaver. Google has started calling photos my "memories" which makes it mentally harder to delete them, because what if I want to know what I was doing on this day five years ago, even if that thing was taking a picture of a discarded coffee cup in the gutter? Ugh.
posted by mecran01 at 10:07 AM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
My anxiety about my Google storage is I don't want to pay for the next tier of service.
I love being able to search my email, but I am considering extracting letters to friends and turning them into journal entries in Obsidian.
With Google photos, a lot of them are just uninteresting, and they show up on our TV screensaver. Google has started calling photos my "memories" which makes it mentally harder to delete them, because what if I want to know what I was doing on this day five years ago, even if that thing was taking a picture of a discarded coffee cup in the gutter? Ugh.
posted by mecran01 at 10:07 AM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
Also, seconding the Internet Archive as a resource and, for things w/out flagrant copyright issues (or at least ones likely to attract attention), a rock-solid place for storage. I've used it to get audio files of old radio airchecks, PDFs of long out-of-print books, ancient technical manuals, a scanned, nearly complete run of a local community newspaper, and other things out of my local storage and keep them accessible. Even better, other people are occasionally using them.
posted by ryanshepard at 10:16 AM on April 13, 2022
posted by ryanshepard at 10:16 AM on April 13, 2022
I consider my photos to be the most important backups since they are stuff I created and no one else has any incentive to keep them. I have them backed up 2 physical places in my house and 2-3 cloud based places. I have already culled bad versions and random photos with no value before copying to cloud.
If you have other content that you have created (including some of that email) I would treat it the same.
The rest of your files are likely held by others, so your backups are not as critical and you can afford to put them on less reliable media. For work emails, once every two weeks or so, I set myself a goal of deleting 100 emails and usually sort by subject so I can knock out big chunks at once.
posted by soelo at 10:46 AM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
If you have other content that you have created (including some of that email) I would treat it the same.
The rest of your files are likely held by others, so your backups are not as critical and you can afford to put them on less reliable media. For work emails, once every two weeks or so, I set myself a goal of deleting 100 emails and usually sort by subject so I can knock out big chunks at once.
posted by soelo at 10:46 AM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
"Being a hoarder" and "having lots of things" (digital or otherwise) are not necessarily the same thing. I agree with other posts that suggest your amount of data is quite small relative to what I would consider hoarding. My digital photos alone come to over half a terabyte and I cull on a regular basis.
But, it doesn't matter what feels like hoarding to us, it matters what hoarding feels like to you. You seem slightly distressed by your situation and it sounds like you're overwhelmed with "things to sort out" rather than literally too many things. If your data was ordered you wouldn't need to ask this question because your world wouldn't feel like it was populated by tottering, towering stacks of stuff which could come crashing down on you at any moment.
The easiest way to cull without regret is to set aside some dedicated time each day or week to go through things. Maybe an hour every Saturday, or 15 minutes after dinner, whatever works for you, but constant, steady progress is much more likely to be successful over a long period of time. One big 27 hour blowout at the weekend once every year won't really help, but a habit you get into will help.
On the first pass of your emails (or photos, or music, or ebooks, or whatever) just cull things you definitely don't want. If you have any doubts about whether you want to keep it, keep it. On the next pass do the same again, and you'll find plenty of things that you don't want and aren't sure why you didn't bin the first time. Rinse and repeat, and you will find you have a lot less.
If you're worried that you will hit your Google drive limit then start with your biggest files, which you can find by using a filter in Gmail. Removing some of your biggest files will buy you a bit of time.
And as always, prevention is better than cure, so try to avoid adding things in the first place. Taken a photo on your phone? Review it before backing it up to Google Photos and delete it right then. Same with emails, ebooks, and other files. The more time it lives on your phone or computer or cloud storage, the more it will become a potential "memory", so cull at first sight.
You control your stuff, your stuff doesn't control you. Good luck, you can do this!
posted by underclocked at 11:36 AM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
But, it doesn't matter what feels like hoarding to us, it matters what hoarding feels like to you. You seem slightly distressed by your situation and it sounds like you're overwhelmed with "things to sort out" rather than literally too many things. If your data was ordered you wouldn't need to ask this question because your world wouldn't feel like it was populated by tottering, towering stacks of stuff which could come crashing down on you at any moment.
The easiest way to cull without regret is to set aside some dedicated time each day or week to go through things. Maybe an hour every Saturday, or 15 minutes after dinner, whatever works for you, but constant, steady progress is much more likely to be successful over a long period of time. One big 27 hour blowout at the weekend once every year won't really help, but a habit you get into will help.
On the first pass of your emails (or photos, or music, or ebooks, or whatever) just cull things you definitely don't want. If you have any doubts about whether you want to keep it, keep it. On the next pass do the same again, and you'll find plenty of things that you don't want and aren't sure why you didn't bin the first time. Rinse and repeat, and you will find you have a lot less.
If you're worried that you will hit your Google drive limit then start with your biggest files, which you can find by using a filter in Gmail. Removing some of your biggest files will buy you a bit of time.
And as always, prevention is better than cure, so try to avoid adding things in the first place. Taken a photo on your phone? Review it before backing it up to Google Photos and delete it right then. Same with emails, ebooks, and other files. The more time it lives on your phone or computer or cloud storage, the more it will become a potential "memory", so cull at first sight.
You control your stuff, your stuff doesn't control you. Good luck, you can do this!
posted by underclocked at 11:36 AM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
Google has started calling photos my "memories" which makes it mentally harder to delete them, because what if I want to know what I was doing on this day five years ago, even if that thing was taking a picture of a discarded coffee cup in the gutter? Ugh.
Make two mental tiers for your photos: Tier 1 is the really important ones that you'd be extremely sad to lose, and Tier 2 is all the less important photos that you might enjoy idly flipping through some day but in reality may well never look at.
Back everything up to at least 2 drives (by the way, these days you can fit all of your data on a single not-too-expensive USB drive too). Put those backups away (ideally in two different geographic locations, but whatever - these are copies you can afford to lose in the worst case.)
When you have time, start going through the main copy of your data - the one that's on your computer - and deleting whatever old photos belong in Tier 2. (Or, alternatively, go through them and pick out the ones that belong in Tier 1 - the ones you really, really want to keep - and then delete the rest.) Don't worry about possibly regretting not keeping something later, because you already have the entire collection multiply backed up. You're just selecting for Tier 1 now; Tiers 1+2 are nicely stored elsewhere. The idea is that this takes the emotional weight off of culling your library (and still leaves open the possibility of looking up your old coffee cup pictures someday in the hypothetical future), while letting you have a much smaller active collection that you can keep on your computer, store additional backups of online, etc.
posted by trig at 12:14 PM on April 13, 2022
Make two mental tiers for your photos: Tier 1 is the really important ones that you'd be extremely sad to lose, and Tier 2 is all the less important photos that you might enjoy idly flipping through some day but in reality may well never look at.
Back everything up to at least 2 drives (by the way, these days you can fit all of your data on a single not-too-expensive USB drive too). Put those backups away (ideally in two different geographic locations, but whatever - these are copies you can afford to lose in the worst case.)
When you have time, start going through the main copy of your data - the one that's on your computer - and deleting whatever old photos belong in Tier 2. (Or, alternatively, go through them and pick out the ones that belong in Tier 1 - the ones you really, really want to keep - and then delete the rest.) Don't worry about possibly regretting not keeping something later, because you already have the entire collection multiply backed up. You're just selecting for Tier 1 now; Tiers 1+2 are nicely stored elsewhere. The idea is that this takes the emotional weight off of culling your library (and still leaves open the possibility of looking up your old coffee cup pictures someday in the hypothetical future), while letting you have a much smaller active collection that you can keep on your computer, store additional backups of online, etc.
posted by trig at 12:14 PM on April 13, 2022
For photos, this year I started spending a few minutes everyday just reviewing photos from today’s date each year. On my iPhone, I just search “April 13” or whatever in Photos, then go through those and trash any I don’t need (e.g., 25 photos in a row of my cat sleeping, a screenshot with tracking info from a package delivered 4 years ago, etc). I usually end up deleting 50-70% of what I find, and I’m not even taking an aggressive approach. I just…have a lot of junk on here.
It’s a manageable task to start on, even when I fall a couple days behind, and it has the bonus side effect of often unearthing little reminders of nice times I had forgotten about, or even just weird cool shit I saw on a walk. Mostly that.
posted by moonbeam at 1:32 PM on April 13, 2022 [6 favorites]
It’s a manageable task to start on, even when I fall a couple days behind, and it has the bonus side effect of often unearthing little reminders of nice times I had forgotten about, or even just weird cool shit I saw on a walk. Mostly that.
posted by moonbeam at 1:32 PM on April 13, 2022 [6 favorites]
Most of it is email
Is it possible that a lot of THAT is actually just attachments that you may not need? I definitely have cut down my gmail in a few ways by doing this
- doing a search for email with attachments that is over 10MB and deleting some of those messages (after downloading the attachments if I need them)
- using Thunderbird to get that email on to my desktop where it's backed up with my regular backups
- after I get it on to my desktop using Thunderbird then I delete categories of email from gmail that I need less like (some) sent mail, old mailing list mail, and stuff from old jobs after a certain amount of time
It might also be worth seeing if you can run a de-duper on both your ebooks (2nding Calibre, it's lovely) and your images (can't offer advice or tools for Google Photos but I am sure they exist) or, if your images are really all backed up on to Flickr, doing a download of all of those images on to your hard drive and then just delete everything on Google Photos.
But I am with other people, I understand that this is concerning to you for both financial and emotional reasons but please don't be too hard on yourself about this, your set up seems super duper normal.
posted by jessamyn at 5:44 PM on April 13, 2022
Is it possible that a lot of THAT is actually just attachments that you may not need? I definitely have cut down my gmail in a few ways by doing this
- doing a search for email with attachments that is over 10MB and deleting some of those messages (after downloading the attachments if I need them)
- using Thunderbird to get that email on to my desktop where it's backed up with my regular backups
- after I get it on to my desktop using Thunderbird then I delete categories of email from gmail that I need less like (some) sent mail, old mailing list mail, and stuff from old jobs after a certain amount of time
It might also be worth seeing if you can run a de-duper on both your ebooks (2nding Calibre, it's lovely) and your images (can't offer advice or tools for Google Photos but I am sure they exist) or, if your images are really all backed up on to Flickr, doing a download of all of those images on to your hard drive and then just delete everything on Google Photos.
But I am with other people, I understand that this is concerning to you for both financial and emotional reasons but please don't be too hard on yourself about this, your set up seems super duper normal.
posted by jessamyn at 5:44 PM on April 13, 2022
Traditional spinning hard drives are the safest for long-term storage, if you store the properly, in the original shock-resistant cartons, and away from any EM fields. And if you have a SATA dock, you can read them back in and/or update them whenever you want.
posted by kschang at 5:49 PM on April 13, 2022
posted by kschang at 5:49 PM on April 13, 2022
Regarding a de-duper for photos, I've been happy with dupeGuruPE, which I think I found through a recommendation here many moons ago.
posted by Nickel at 6:59 PM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Nickel at 6:59 PM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
For one part of the issue: Mailstore Home can archive your email to a searchable database on local storage from just about any mail package you use, including Gmail. You can search the database easily and quickly. An added plus - you can archive from one email system (such as Outlook) and restore to a different one (Thunderbird for example). Free for home use. It doesn't totally support scheduling (there's a way to do it, but it involves finding the command 'under the covers' and putting it into a task scheduler) but their for-money version, Mailstore Server does.
posted by TimHare at 10:21 AM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by TimHare at 10:21 AM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by praemunire at 8:58 AM on April 13, 2022 [9 favorites]