Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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.

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.

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

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

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

All the time. It's my primary source of entertainment media. And why would I want to avoid hoarding? Hoarding is the goal.

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

There's no reason to avoid hoarding!

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

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.

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

help me

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

No issue hoarding if you're seeding

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

what is the problem?

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

I watch movies and series once, and keep them on my hard drive until I'm running out of space, then delete from the oldest to newest. Music I'll consume very regularly.

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)