[DallasBiff]

Oh God! They will never stop.

[HollyB]

“Get rid of your documents while we scrub”

[Edward Teach]

Hard drives are cheap.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

I'm partly guilty. But I have good reason. I do regular 'housekeeping' on my storage but there are things I will never delete. All my music files, old pics and vids from when my kids were young. Old install files...gone. Old outdated docs and such...gone.

But saving everything? Nah. Storage is cheaper than ever but some thing has gots ta go.

[G Larry]

You should see my collection of bit buckets! Chock full of 1’s and 0’s....

[Alberta's Child]

I organize and archive e-mails meticulously for business reasons.

It sometimes pays big dividends. A client of mine was able to win a six-figure settlement in a lawsuit — as the original DEFENDANT in the case — because I was able to track down an e-mail from 12+ years earlier that completely undermined the plaintiff’s case.

[No.6]

The cost of storage decreases by orders of magnitude per decade. No reason to delete, and plenty of reasons to archive.

What this is about is that the Orwellian memoryhole process doesn’t work when pesky anons keep dredging up awkward statements and data that contradict The Current Thing (tm). If we could just delete the past, they could own the future. Ha.

[paulcissa]

I spent a few early years in my IT career managing several petabytes of file shares. Some people keep everything, sometimes in duplicate/triplicate (and more).

Someone needs to take out the trash. The "Delete" key brings a sense of freedom. It's no different than anything else - If you don't use it, pitch it.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Oh fortheloveofalgore.

Keep what you like.

Unlike real life hoarding, it does not smell or attract rats and it drives the government nuts.

These are all good things.

[Seruzawa]

Lol. Another “disorder”. Any way to make a buck.

[Blood of Tyrants]

I saw this when my wife’s work computerized the pharmacy. They keep everything. Forever.

Same with car companies. They keep every bit of data, down to how many turns it takes for an automatic wrench to tighten a bolt and what the torque is recorded. Each step is recorded and gives permission for the next step to proceed.

[ifinnegan]

It doesn’t take up physical space.

Deleting is stupid.

[Luke21]

The commies are coming for your hard drive next. They wang to scrub them like Google.

[Shady]

I have 75,000 E-mails spread over 4 accounts. The junk I get is overwhelming.

[al baby]

Id like to know who keeps deleting my memory

[Right Brigade]

I have dozens of hard drives full of my life one dating back to windows 3.1.
Are they recoverable after all these years?
I haven’t tried.
Maybe someday on a trip down memory lane.

[EasySt]

Owning a 128 Terabyte NAS makes me guilty by default.

[fr_freak]

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM) recognizes hoarding disorder as a mental illness

Gotta love these guys. Men having anal sex with other men? Just fine. Men and women getting body parts cut off to pretend they are the opposite sex? Absolutely dandy. But fail to delete old documents and emails and photos from ten years ago? Into the looney bin with ya!

[Disambiguator]

I just got rid of my collection of 5-1/4” floppy disks in the last few years. Had my 90s data on them. I figured if I didn’t need the data after 25-30 years it was probably ok to ditch them.

The real truth is that they were squirreled away somewhere where I forgot about them.

[Bubba_Leroy]

I have about 4 TB of digital files that I have accumulated over the past 30+ years. I scan all of my paper files and shred the originals. I also have digital copies of all of the photos, videos, music, audiobooks, and ebooks I have accumulated over the years.

I backup my digital files to multiple redundant backups (5TB portable hard drives are less than $100 now). I have everything fairly well organized, so it is easy to find anything. When I am dead, if my kids don’t want it they can just hit delete.

I have dealt with several actual physical hoarders over the years. There is a world of difference.

[Mr. Jeeves]

Probably planning Federal limits on private individual storage capacity. I remember long ago when the first gigabyte hard drives began to appear some salty liberal columnist complained in print that “Nobody needs a billion of anything.” That attitude may still persist among his aging government peers.