Gizmodo: “When it comes to their stuff, people often have a hard time letting go. When the object of their obsession are rooms full of old clothes or newspapers, it can be unhealthy—even dangerous. But what about a stash that fits on 10 5-inch hard drives? Online, you’ll find people who use hashtags like “#digitalhoarder” and hang out in the 120,000-subscriber Reddit forum called /r/datahoarder, where they trade tips on building home data servers, share collections of rare files from video game manuals to ambient audio records, and discuss the best cloud services for backing up files The often stereotyped hoarders letting heaps of physical items of questionable utility dominate their homes and lives often suffer social stigma and anxiety as a result. By contrast, many self-proclaimed digital hoarders say they enjoy their collections, can keep them contained in a relatively small amount of physical space, and often take pleasure in sharing them with other hobbyists or anyone who wants access to the same public data. “Data hoarder means to me simply someone who collects and curates digital data,” said the user -Archivist, one of the moderators of /r/datahoarder, in a private message on Reddit. “It’s a little removed from the disorder we usually see from traditional hoarders.”…

What users seem to prefer to see are discussions of unusual and intricate storage setups, guides to using complex archive software and, of course, interesting datasets, from public-domain collections of vintage scientific papers to old BBC sound effect samples. Public archives, naturally, are a plus…”