>>27851
>Did you ever do something like this?
Yes.
>Did u regret deleting stuff?
Greatly.
I'm very hasty to do things like this and I always regret it. Maybe because I'm not too bothered by being aimless and unproductive or whatever. I can't speak for you, but I know I'll probably just go back to how I am as that's just who I am.
I think rather than deleting some of this stuff, you could stick it on some sort of drive and keep it in a closet or somewhere it's a bit of a pain to dig out. So that way there is nothing to regret and you can look again in some years and laugh.

I don't think I'd ever want to let go of such things. One of the great tragedies in my life was losing a hard disk when I was in high school. My current collection of files only goes up to just after then, and I wish I had some stuff from back then too.

Yes, I did that. It amounted to nothing but losing the only friends I had online.
Furthermore I regret it greatly to have deleted all that stuff I once had. I even sold a lot of the stuff I once had, which is also something I regret deeply. With that I lost a lot of keepsakes and with them probably a lot of memories too, because I tend to remember a lot of stuff while looking at things from the past.
While things improved at first, they went worse afterwards. All that remains is some work experience, money and relationship experience. Overall I don't consider it worth it and have regrets.

If you have to do it for some reason, then don't delete anything. Back everything up and put it somewhere safe. In my experience what is important does not come back, it remains lost.

>things that really did matter will return to me eventually.
That's not true, things link rot on the internet easily, and you may well have the only copy of something still left. A more pragmatic approach would be to first go through and sort your stuff into buckets based on how unique you think it is, or how easily it would be to reproduce.

For instance, things like screenshots are essentially derivative works that can easily be reproduced given the source medium, and for most shows after 2005 you'll be able to find the source easily. Even if the entire internet somehow gets scrubbed of the links, blurays would exist, so you should be fine there. For things like music, or special tracks, these are much rarer, so I would recommend keeping a backup somewhere. For text-based works or anything that's not strictly copyrighted, e.g. fansubs, I would recommend uploading to the internet archive. If you have saved any MAD, AMV, or MMD type videos, I'd upload those to IA as well.

Storing references to things is cheaper than storing the thing itself, so storing that list of bookmarks is essentially free and I'd just email it to myself.

>>27856
Oh forgot to mention that even amongst works that are non-derivative (e.g. pixiv download dumps), another orthogonal dimension might be how "useful" it is in terms of marginal utility. For instance, while you may well have the only copy of some pixiv uploader's art remaining, unless it is particularly sentimental to you or (if it's h-work) for a niche fetish or something, it's unlikely to be of much value in the future given that there's plenty of other similar material. If you check on sadpanda and see that someone's already uploaded it, you could probably safely delete that.

>>27856
>>27857
It's not that I have not enough storage space, it's that i've realized that i took things too far (obsession with internet and digital content in general) and now it's time to fix things for good.

I'm selecting some stuff that is truly dear to me and let go of the rest. I wont delete stuff (for now) just put it on hard drives that i don't use (as others have suggested).

As some of you, I also lost / deleted stuff in the past that I missed greatly. Nice content made by others and even some drawings and fun little programs Ive made. On the other hand i threw out ton of real-life and digital stuff in the past years that made me feel great relief. Being to afraid of loosing something just keeps us paralyzed I think.

Physical stuff is what's weighed me down more so than digital stuff. Digital storage space only gets cheaper and more plentiful with time. Yes, it's true I have a massive amount of poorly organized files and 1,000 tabs on my browser. Far as I'm concerned, that's something to work on bit by bit on rainy days. I don't feel like it does any harm just having it there. Granted, seems like every time I upgrade to a new laptop, I'd make a backup of the old files and kinda forget about em, mostly starting new.

Physical stuff on the other hand...
I used to have this problem of buying tons of figures and weeb junk, stuff I wouldn't have space for and from things that I only mildly liked. That and collecting other types of toys and junk too. Even while having a room twice the size of any normal room, I still had to keep a lot of stuff packed/stored because there just wasn't enough space for it all.
Then covid happened, that all went into storage, and I spent a couple hard years forced to be apart from the junk I spent decades gathering. Because I didn't have a stable address during this time, I flat out couldn't order anything more.
In a sense, I guess this was like a form of rehab, being forced to quit cold turkey and take only a handful of things. Then being forced to do that yet again not that long ago with even less stuff now. There's a bit of my old ways wanting to creep back in for sure, but because I don't know for sure if I'm going to be staying or going or what, I gotta try to hold myself back at least a little.

>>27860
>1,000 tabs
Never got this. It's hoarding, plain and simple. Close your browser and all those useless, clutter tabs. Bookmark something you want to save, rather than keeping it in a tab you'll "get to eventually". Close tabs as soon as you don't need them anymore.

Post edited on 27th Nov 2022, 12:10pm

>>27861
a tab in a browser isn't all that far removed from an outsourced train of thought, frozen in time til you have the time and energy to deal with it; if you close it prematurely, it may never come back
granted, i tend to back mine up in bookmark-folders once they build up too much and as such i've never gotten anywhere near a thousand, but the attachment is understandable

>>27886
>if you close it prematurely, it may never come back
Hoarding revolves around the inability to let go.

>>27861
I do this as well, but I don't have 1000, I have about 300.

It's not actually that annoying, it serves as a constant reminder and they are quite easy to access.

I'm OP. Just a follow-up on what i did so far. Made proper backups to offline hard-drives. I let things go with peace so i have no intention to use those backups ever but you can never know.
Removed all movies except 2 old comedies I like. Pruned my videos folder quite a bit and it is still ongoing. Pruned my anime folder. Pruned my images folders, including the healing stuff. That one hurt a bit but now new stuff can come in. Pruned my games (and setup/installer) folders. VNs too. Removed almost all porn. Also removed nearly all watch-laters, check-it-out-laters, saved browser sessions, TODO lists, etc. I love music and most songs I have, so couldn't do much pruning there.
I have other folders with books, saved web pages, screencaps, i will deal with those one day.

>>27860
By the way you talk about those things my guess is that your attachment to most of them is a rather superficial one. Like "crap, buying this stuff costed me money and time and it doesn't look that bad so it's a waste to throw it away". Maybe you could sell them or give them away. I gave away physical objects and it felt absurd and stupid at that moment but within days i started to feel like a big weight was off my chest.

>>27861
>>27886
I only ever use exactly as many tabs as I need for a task at hand. Even when working on programming/statistics related stuff, I never ever felt the need for another monitor and never felt the need to go back to a tab.
>a tab in a browser isn't all that far removed from an outsourced train of thought, frozen in time til you have the time and energy to deal with it; if you close it prematurely, it may never come back
I guess my workflow has changed a lot since I was in middle school, but I never just "surf the internet" anymore. I already know what I'm going to be doing with a tab as soon as I open it, and once I've found the resource I was looking for, I just close it. At a maximum I've had multiple tabs open to look at multiple pictures in individual tabs for whatever reason, but otherwise it usually never gets above 3, that being a tab for music, a tab for whatever imageboard or forum I'm on, and maybe a tab for messing around in an HTML program I use. I find that once I've gone through a thought journey, whatever information is left there is something I can improve on. I almost never go back to the exact same idea twice. I never save tabs, I rarely keep bookmarks. Even when just using the web for fun I have a general idea of how much space I'll need in terms of tabs, it rarely surpasses a half dozen on the most cluttered days. If i can't remember it, it wasn't worth keeping open anyway, is my mindset.

>>27894
Your mindset and workflow is a healthy one. I used to have ton of tabs open and multiple windows and text files and folders. And my desk full of papers. It was the reflection of my wrecked mind.

>>27894
I have tabs open for things I plan to buy, it's easier to just have it ready that way, and I have tabs open for each tag that I check on Gelbouru each day plus a PIXIV page that lists the artists I follow and then I have numerous sites that I check regularly like Gmail, my stock brokerage account, real estate, Youtube, Tohno, F95 zone etc. And then I also have MAL pages open for things I plan to watch and other random pages to remind me about things.
This work flow works quite well for me and it's a lot more organised than it probably sounds as I know where the tabs are and they are grouped with similar tabs.

Post edited on 5th Dec 2022, 7:08am