I’m not <20 now, however started downloading things when I would have been around 13 and we first got the internet. Back then broadband wasn’t really a thing so downloading something on dialup was a big commitment and could only really be done over night as it made the internet unusable for anyone else who wanted to use it. So i kept everything I downloaded as formatting and re-installing Windows 98 every few months was a common occurrence back then.
I used to have a 20gb hard drive dedicated to downloads, this gradually grew over the years so i’d burn stuff on CD-R’s and later DVD-R’s to save space. My downloads drive was eventually an 80gb drive, this grew to a 120gb drive, 500gb drive, 1tb drive and so on. Eventually I ended up with 4x 2TB USB drives, however my OG modded Xbox could not play content from USB drives. So I ended up getting a HP Micro Server and installing Windows Home Server on that, essentially building my first Nas and allowing content to be accessed from anywhere without having my power hungry PC switched on all the time.
I’m not sure I’m the typical “DataHoarder” compared to others i’ve seen post on here. My “hoard” is essentially family photos / videos, documents and my media collection. I was quite in to the Xbox / Xbox 360 so I started preserving digital content from those consoles, along with Pokemon event distributions as I am also really interested in Pokemon. This got me interested in content preservation for things im passionate about, which is what I guess you could say I was doing building a media collection over the years.
Either way I follow this subreddit as theirs a lot of useful info posted in regards to storing data.
I’m not <20 now, however started downloading things when I would have been around 13 and we first got the internet. Back then broadband wasn’t really a thing so downloading something on dialup was a big commitment and could only really be done over night as it made the internet unusable for anyone else who wanted to use it. So i kept everything I downloaded as formatting and re-installing Windows 98 every few months was a common occurrence back then.
I used to have a 20gb hard drive dedicated to downloads, this gradually grew over the years so i’d burn stuff on CD-R’s and later DVD-R’s to save space. My downloads drive was eventually an 80gb drive, this grew to a 120gb drive, 500gb drive, 1tb drive and so on. Eventually I ended up with 4x 2TB USB drives, however my OG modded Xbox could not play content from USB drives. So I ended up getting a HP Micro Server and installing Windows Home Server on that, essentially building my first Nas and allowing content to be accessed from anywhere without having my power hungry PC switched on all the time.
I’m not sure I’m the typical “DataHoarder” compared to others i’ve seen post on here. My “hoard” is essentially family photos / videos, documents and my media collection. I was quite in to the Xbox / Xbox 360 so I started preserving digital content from those consoles, along with Pokemon event distributions as I am also really interested in Pokemon. This got me interested in content preservation for things im passionate about, which is what I guess you could say I was doing building a media collection over the years.
Either way I follow this subreddit as theirs a lot of useful info posted in regards to storing data.