It IS a whole lot of pics! Mostly cats and pictures of myself and my partner from the last ten years while we’re young and smexy. Hopefully we’ll have more when we’re old and smexy. But 95% cats.

Random files? Sure! Lotta stuff that I feel might get deleted from YouTube. Some of it has. Every banned Disney cartoon. Lots of North Korean cartoon propaganda! Really weird old stuff. Tons of old VHS tape rips of stuff like Toonami with commercials from the early ‘00s. Loooooots of downloads of full threads from /b/ 2003-2009.

Between me and my partner I have almost 150 000 pictures backed up.

Now that we got 2 kids it’s growing even faster !

I should probably sort them to keep only the important ones but right now my time is more precious than the cost of few 100s Go so I just back up everything.

Yeah I don’t know why they came at you with so much snark.

I gather you leave all your digital presence to cloud services? If it ain’t in your computer, you don’t own it. I’ve seen people deal with all sorts of problems because they only had one copy of whatever digital file. Computers aren’t eternal, if anything they are actually more fickle than some physical mediums. Don’t trust mega corporations to keep your data safe, some will sneeze, fuck you over and won’t care because either you weren’t a paying customer or your problems just aren’t profitable enough for even a real human to look at your pleads for assistance.

Its the backing up books / movies / shows / games I do not fully get tbh., to me it feels a bit like digital hoarding.

I mean, yea you’re not wrong but it’s not like I have piles off shit all through my house I have to build trails to get through. It’s a server and external drives sitting in a corner and it lets me have whatever I want to read/watch at my fingertips instead of having to find it on streaming somewhere. There’s probably stuff in there I’ll never look at again but there’s a lot that sometimes I just get in the mood for and it’s right there ready to go or if I can’t decide I can pick something at random.

I can certainly see why some would not want to mess with it and I do have a pretty huge backlog of tech debt where I have to sort things out of my “downloads” folder into my media library but all in all I think it’s worth it. It’s the one thing I allow myself to just go crazy on because it’s so cost efficient. Buying actual objects that will take up space in my house is another story, those things get vetted thoroughly before I pull the trigger on the purchase.