Over the last 2 years, I’ve noticed that I spend WAY more time carefully cataloguing my collections of digital media (games, anime) than actually experiencing those media.
I would spend months carefully renaming the files, grouping them into folders by franchise, creating watch order files, remuxing videos so they would only have one audio and one subtitle file, reencoding videos that I considered bloated, reencoding videos that had flac or 5.1 audio to opus stereo, putting all my files into a spreadsheet along with other information, etc. etc.
Today I realized that my obsession is pointless. I’m just wasting my life doing something that’s not enjoyable, instead of experiencing the media I’ve collected. Who am I making those neat-looking catalogues for? I will never pass on my collection to anyone. I am just lost in my unhealthy obsession instead of enjoying life.
So yeah. Today I’ve decided to stop wasting my time. I will keep archiving (because I believe that in the future, the governments will make it very difficult to share copyrighted media online), but I will stop trying to make my collection look nice and tidy.
I will also delete stuff that I’ve watched/played that I didn’t enjoy. I’ve come to a realization there’s no point archiving it if I’m never going to use it again.
Anyways, I hope this helps someone realize that obsessions with cataloguing your hoards are unhealthy and a waste of life.
Well don’t get too lazy. For media I do almost nothing except rename titles in Plex and fix issues as I see them. I transcode automatically with tdarr but if it fails on a file I don’t look into it. I’m pretty lazy and disorganized so having tools like radarr is nice. The bad part about me being lazy and disorganized is I tend to not organize my personal files.
I just spent 8 hours today moving my own data around structuring it in a way that hopefully makes sense. I have probably another 3 weekends of reorganization to do. I build my server years ago to store all my own data but because it was so disorganized it I basically just gave up besides setting up backups for my devices. I didn’t bother to collect all the data from the previous hard-drives that I used for backups and media storage. I do photography and videography as a hobby so I have a few of 4TB HDD filled with just my own footage. None of it’s backed up and it’s getting to that point that the disks will start failing if I don’t get organized and back stuff up appropriately.
My plan right now is to build a good foundation. Bring everything in just so I can see how much storage I need to build a second server to actually back it all up correctly. I estimate I have 15 TB of data across all the drives but I’m sure there is duplicates somewhere. Manually going through it all is going to be a PITA. I wish I had done a better job of keeping up with it over the years.