If i need something, i go look for it, download it and keep it seeding until i have no more space on my hard drive. I rarely download things i don‘t actually need or want at the moment.

Haha, good question. You’re not alone with that. I suppose you just clean up once per year. Like you’re supposed to do with your wardrobe, or that one drawer in the kitchen…

My goal is to store everything, that way I have no dependence on remote media

I watch movies and series once, and keep them on my hard drive until I’m running out of space, then delete from the oldest to newest. Music I’ll consume very regularly.

How do you avoid “hoarding”?

Looks at my 28TB storage array that’s 3/4 full…

Avoid hoarding? Let’s just say I bring a real “gotta catch em all” energy to the trackers.

All the time. It’s my primary source of entertainment media. And why would I want to avoid hoarding? Hoarding is the goal.

There’s no reason to avoid hoarding!

Outside of a small handful, I don’t rewatch movies and feel no drive to keep my own copies. I keep a “to watch” list in Letterbox’d and that is excessively long, but I rarely have more than a couple dozen movies downloaded from that list at any given time. That’s how I do books too, long “to read” list but actually downloaded, not much.

Music is a different story. I can pull up the playlist for the first mixed CD I burned in middle school and everything since then. Also where I tend to focus my seeding efforts.

A) Almost every day. I have a constant backlog/watchlist but it’s small and fairly constant.

B) Once or twice a year I go over my media and delete movies or shows that I’m definitely not watching again. I am hoarding, though only the good stuff. Nothing wrong with that.

I keep the stuff I download and seed it until I run out of room, I have a TB hdd for movies and such; and since I download like huge files, I usually delete stuff if I don’t care about it a lot

Storage is cheap. There’s no reason to delete content.

Do you need the space? If not who cares.

Personally I run a media service for friends and family. I’m about to bring another 100tb online because we are running low on storage. Am I holding or just running a rack of servers in my basement?

What I do is sort the directories and files by size and go largest to smallest. Based on the likely distribution of files sizes, 20% of your files and/or directories will account for 80% of the hard drive space. I usually then choose candidates for deletion and evaluate them, deleting them on the spot or skipping them for this time. I do this until I get the space reduction I want or until I’m sure that I want to keep what is in the largest 20%. After I reach one of the two states: top 20% of files/directories are keepers or I deleted down X GB. This method can be done with any sorting method. For example, by play count or by date added, old to new. Keep going until the top 20% are keepers. The same distribution is likely to apply across all vertical data labels so the filter is generically usable in lots of situations. For example, 20% of car drivers likely get 80% of speeding tickets. We could reduce speeding by 80% by speed limiting these drivers’ cars or by revoking their drivers licenses. Another example is memory hogs in a computer system. The top 20% of memory hogging programs likely account for 80% of used memory in a system. This distribution is called the Pareto principle. The principle is an example of a power law.

I only pirate TV/movies, and since I never know what I’ll feel like watching it’s pretty easy to just hoard it. Takes a long time to fill up drives so adding a 16TB drive once a year or two is pretty manageable.

But tbh the main reason I hoard them and keep my Plex library full is simply to keep view stats. Prior to Plex I was constantly plagued by “have I seen this” or “what was that movie I liked 10 years ago?”. But not anymore!

Also, when the zombie apocalypse happens I’ll finally have time to rewatch Breaking Bad so I need an offline copy just in case.