Data Hoarding

Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family. Kofi Annan Recently I was asked what I do in my free time, and among other things, I named my love for what is known as “Data Hoarding.” This piqued the interest of the person who asked and I went onto explain what data hoarding entailed. Once they understood, they were confused about the appeal of data hoarding. The definition and motivations of data hoarding differ from person to person. Some say they data hoard so that they can have all of their content in the same place, whilst others believe in a grander purpose, the preservation and protection of information for generations in the future. As we march ever further into the digital age, astronomical quantities of information are created each and every day. Millions of examples of music, videos, forms, documents, papers, essays, books, pictures, etc. pour onto our digital landscape waiting for someone to gaze upon it. The beauty of this fact is that we have more information on any given subject than any society so far in the entirety of human history. We have substantial knowledge not only of our current day but also of centuries past. All of this is chaotically spewn about, loosely organized by web crawlers and gathered on indexes. This chaos leads to a lack of protection, every day as more data is added, more is lost. It isn’t uncommon for services to truncate large quantities of data without giving a thought to its significance. Services go offline, servers go down, content is removed, data is lost. ...