Is there such a thing as the opposite of a data hoarder?

I would probably call them a data purger.

Minimalist, or just poor planner?

Destroyer Of Worlds

cloud service?

I always hope the Pied Piper guy will come and I will be able to fit it all in one hand. One day, one day..

To answer you - don't be a martyr of your data. Find a balance. I chose to save everything, but compress the hell out of it. I.e. I save all photos from my phone, but compress them to 1080p and <= 1MB Jpeg. Because I don't need the tiny details from photos, I just want to keep memories.

Data consumer.

An ephemerist, someone who enjoys things that are fleeting, temporary, out of sight and out of mind once they're used.

This is my wife. Until we married my wife would even save sms. Would clean everything she hated to have stuff particularly in her phone. It wasn’t until I showed her the benefits of having something like Google photos to easily search for things

Yeah, the ‘you own nothing and you will be happy’ people.

Yes, someone who doesn’t data hoard.

Dataphobic

Datarded

There sure are and you see it in the video piracy community all the time. You have guys that love giant episodes, and then people download the same episode at the same resolutions that is 1/10 the size! I can't imagine watching a 200 to 300mb episode of a 44 minute show. Personally I would rather watch something on BluRay most of the time over streaming due to the low quality of so many movies on major streaming providers.

DataWaster

Yep, I had a friend that matched exactly as the opposite of a data hoarder.
I asked him why would he behaves that way, not even saving the photos to hard drives when he switched to new phones. He said he hate his past, and there's nothing to look behind from present time. He had only few of his sport car's photos, few of his cat's photos, not much photos even moments with his girl friend. At the age of mid 20s, he has at most 1GB of his valuable data to keep.

My company

What has prompted your interest in data hoarding?

Censorship and Memory-holing

The end user who frequently asks if their data can please please be retrieved

Alzheimers patient

To borrow a term from the Wikipedians: "Deletionist"

There are people who will format and reinstall their os without copying any data… and they don’t have any backups

A data loser ? 😂

There are people who constantly pay for movies, music, and other data but constantly lose it or don't keep track of it. Only to buy it again and again. They also subscribe to multiple streaming services.

The data minimalist is going to be so bored when the zombie apocalypse/crash of the economy/Mad Maxx in real life starts and they don't have a PB of TV Shows and movies to keep them entertained over the next 80-100 years. Lol

It's called Yahoo.com. Every archivist on the Internet gets Vietnam War flashbacks whenever one of their websites shows up in the news.

I use TailsOS as my daily driver, with persistent storage disabled.

You should rest easy then knowing that at any moment the drive could break and lose everything. It will delete stuff for you.

I am not sure whether there's an official term for it (though dataphobe comes to mind, but it seems a little off), but there are a lot of minimalists when it comes to data. Probably the kinds of people that handle info that are sensitive and has to be purged frequently. Well, that or the person doesn;t really care about the files and only keeps what s/he needs.

As much as it's a goal of mine to hoard, I kinda do not have as huge as the storages of the other people here, but I tend to keep free indie games I could find, even demos sometimes, and some obscure alternative software for certain paid apps. Usual reason for the hoard is for offline use; I do not want a cloud-only environment.

DataPurger. I like to save the meaningful/useful stuff, but I don't keep everything for the sake of it. I try to have an efficient workflow during content creation, and purge the unwanted stuff straight away.

I’m 72, I would have loved the convenience of photos that we have today. Have some photos of youth, but cameras, film, developing, cost, etc was a pain. And even then quality of photos weren’t that great.

A cloud storage user.

A Buddhist. Everything is in a state of impermanence.

A Marie Kondo script.

One of my old housemates had a very organised data collection. One of his forms of catharsis was to go on a deleting spree. If he had a bad day, or an argument at work, or got pwned by fourteen year-olds in CS too much, he'd take it out on his meticulous data directory.

Yes, that would be my friend. The dude HATE having anything on his PC. When I say hate I mean HATE, it's so bad to the point where he has a portable version of vlc on his google drive that he downloads every time he wants to watch something and then delete it afterwards. It's portable for fuck's sake just leave it.

Most people.

Most people never back up and they prefer the convenience of streaming subscriptions to actually owning anything.

Well my girlfriend not only deletes every email and empties the trash in her mailbox daily, she also throws away every piece of paper she receives. This has often led to problems (e.g. wanted to check and see if email again or needed a receipt to exchange something). However she says that those inconveniences are better than having to store all the stuff.

My motivation? I guess deep down a fear of loss, buy also just the good feeling of having stuff ready in case I need it one day.

Netflixer?

...but I'd rather call them idiots: Usually those people are just too dumb to backup anything themselves (with very few exceptions).

TBH I am a weird mix. I back up the things I really really care about, then delete a ton of other things to conserve as much storage as possible. I regularly go through emails and delete anything that isn't a newsletter I want to read or that I might need in the future, and move the ones I keep to different folders. I regularly check to makd sure photos on my device are only the ones I truely need/like. I go through the documents I download, and start deleting useless trash and then highly organizing the stuff I keep in folders. So I have like 58 GB of just Ebooks and audiobooks (The ebooks and audiobooks are mostly Project Gutenberg and Librivox ones, but I do buy a few modern Audibook CDs every so often and put them on there, and Google Play Books makes it easy to buy and download no DRM free ebooks) and then like 10 GB of music from CDs, digital marketplaces like Amazon Music, and Bandcamp, etc. But then I also don't really have many pictures or videos on my phone at all. I just hate the idea of buying things or spending money on them, and not owning them for real.

I knew a guy that reformatted his hard drive and reinstalled pretty much every month. He said it kept his machine optimized.

BBC.

databurner?

my friend, there is only one alternative, that is going off grid, pulling the plug of that damn fiber connection

it's not a good idea to completely stay offline, but the opposite of a data hoarder is a normal person who is not concerned about data flow, where it comes, goes and the methods of storage. this is extremely unhealthy, and if you're already experiencing anxiety, it's the final phase before you suffer a mental break down

the trick with anxiety is that if your brain gets used to it, it's always there and you will always suffer from it. psychiatrists are training people the opposite way with antidepressants, they get the brain used to not caring and less anxiety, a bit sedated and relaxed, and the brain goes automatic

Healthy person.

My grandma

a healthy person? (i am a data hoarder - this include physical books as well.)

A Spotify user.

Normal

Data Marie Kondo? Does this Linux ISO spark joy?

A data eschewer

Luddite

PM

Someone who has everything in the cloud, except for their OS, so their device requires the absolute minimum of storage

Every common user is the opposite.

They dont care about their data. They let others care about it for them.They dont check if their emails from 209 are still in their mailbox.

They dont care if the photos from 2020 vacations are in their new phone.

They dont save photos to their computer, ever.

they dont have their songs saved anywhere else than in their spotify.

They dont realize the vidoes on their youtube playlist are gone missing.

They let corpos manage their data and hope thae data will still be there no matter how they dont care personally.

Data Disposer

My mom has her few documents and photos in Google's cloud and nothing on her computer but bookmarks. She thinks it's safer because she's had a hard drive fail. I've told her Google can zap her account at any time.

I collect data I would miss if it were gone.

AI photo classification has nearly reached the point where we no longer have to manually organize our photos. I'm counting on it to save my bacon after years of procrastination on that organization.

My pandemic project was to get a hold on my data and preserve it.

I got all my hdd from multiple locations into one spot some as old as 20 years, new hdd, setup freenas on hardware with ecc ram. I extracted everything into fresh RAID.

It was like, 10 tb.

Then, one particularly long weekend alone, I looked over it all, and I started deleting...

I didn't need system backups for hardware I don't even have I didn't need old torrent downloads under 720p, they hurt my eyes tbh I didn't need backups of steam folders I didn't need research and downloads and homework for high school and college

I was down to 6tb

Then I got serious: incomplete seasons, movies that I didn't see myself watching again, non-sentimental files over 10 years old, all the ISOs for software I can't even run in modern windows or have found modern software to replace.

down to 4tb

I put music on one hdd, and everything else (photos and file) I wanted to save, and it came out to 1 tb. I uploaded that archive to a cloud, and a local copy, and a cold storage copy, and I immediately regretted doing everything I did to setup a FreeNAS on purpose built hardware. It wasn't worth all that for 1tb of data. However, now I see that if I hadn't done all that, I wouldn't have everything I wanted to keep in a safe place.

I recently moved and got new hardware, I downloaded that archive and updated it with the new files and pictures I wanted to keep, and reuploaded it. Done, and I don't have data anxiety anymore.

    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

There's a thing called Obsessive-Compulsive Spartanism (a form of OCD) that could be applied to data or anything else. The presence of things seems to cause a nagging anxiety which leads to them trying to free themselves from things. This isn't minimalism per se. In extreme cases someone may buy something, say a toaster, then throw it away, then find they need a toaster and buy another one. My spouse has some of those tendencies and I am always saving things from the trash and sometimes even backing up her office computers that she doesn't even own.

Then there's us folks here. There's a theory that some of us have an innate belief that resources are limited and we must take advantage of the opportunity to get what we can now. Our anxiety comes from the fear of losing our stuff and not having a backup. This may seem perplexing to some because we devote so much of our resources to getting and keeping that stuff. For me it only becomes a problem when I know I have it but can't find it. Or realizing maybe I do have a problem when I find a brand new 16TB drive in a pile of computer parts that I don't remember buying, then a week later finding another one.
There's also the data curators here that find gathering and organizing beautiful and calming. Many of us here are bits of both.

Normal modern people are the opposite; everything on cloud no data on hand, except maybe photos and videos captured on phones.

Weird

People who have every streaming service out there.

There are people who don't even bookmark web pages. They don't have a Youtube watch later list. If they don't read/watch it now, they'll think of it later. Or not, and it won't matter.

I'm barely a hoarder by the standards of this sub. But I want my movies and music locally, so that imposes some necessity.

A Virgin.

people who use streaming

Wouldn't that be most people? Casually consuming media and just downloading onto their one laptop every once in a while.

I'd use a term like 'non-collector' which I work with a lot of people who just go home and watch streaming services, some even play videogames on subscription services like Xbox Game Pass and don't actually buy anything to own. At all.

They spend their money on food and travel, and don't collect anything. I guess that's the opposite of us?