Are You a (Digital) Hoarder? - Good article...

Are You a (Digital) Hoarder?
Deb Shinder, Editor
feedback@wxpnews.com
 

Compulsive hoarding is a psychological disorder that often pops up in the news. Pathological hoarders acquire more and more possessions, far beyond what they need, to the point where it causes problems in their lives. This condition is common enough that there is even a TV program on A&E that looks at different real-life hoarders and takes viewers inside their (often extremely crowded) homes:
http://www.wxpnews.com/0WJMWV/110405-Hoarders


Some of these "packrats" collect all kinds of things indiscriminately. Others "specialize," piling up thousands of old newspapers and creating a fire hazard or taking in hundreds of pet animals that they're unable to care for, resulting in unsanitary conditions that are detrimental to the pets themselves as well as the humans who can't seem to resist adopting "just one more."

Many of us have mild packrat tendencies. My parents grew up during the depression era, and instilled in me an aversion to "wasting" things, so it pains me to throw out a perfectly good item even if I know I'll probably never use it. I regularly force myself to go through and clean out my closets and garage but it's always hard to part with things. And there are some things that I simply won't get rid of, such as books, which I have filling shelves all over the house and packed in boxes in those same closets and garage. My book fetish probably stems from the time that I sold my vast collection of books to a used bookstore back when I was in my 20s, and regretted it for years. Excessive book hoarding even has its own label: bibliomania. I don't think I'm quite there yet, since I rarely keep multiple copies of the same book and don't have them stacked on the floors of my rooms, but I definitely have far more books than I really need.

My husband hoards food and first aid supplies. After September 11, he started building a "stash" in case a catastrophic event cut off the regular supply channels. As obsessions go, it's probably not a bad one to have, but sometimes I think it's gotten a little out of hand. We keep having to have more shelves built in the pantry to hold his growing stocks of canned goods and OTC medicines. However, if a disaster strikes, I can rest assured that we won't go hungry (or go crazy from lack of reading material).

Whether you stockpile ammunition, own hundreds of pairs of shoes, have a basement filled to the brim with power tools you never use, or still have every utility bill you ever received dating back to 1957, in most cases these limited hoarding tendencies won't cause you any problems. They might conceivably even one day prove to have been the smart thing to do. Where you cross the line into mental illness is when your hoarding behavior is clearly causing harm to yourself or others, but you still can't stop.

I recently read an interesting article in Forbes called The Problem with Packrats, which discusses the "high costs of digital hoarding." Dr. Stanton D. Sloane, the president and CEO of a company that provides IT services to the federal government, makes the argument that we are damaging the environment by storing too much data, and that we need to engage in "data disposal" and not save all our email, chat logs, and other digital files. You can read the article at
http://www.wxpnews.com/0WJMWV/110405-Digital-Hoarding

Dr. Sloane warns us of the dangers of becoming "compulsive data keepers." He implies that it's irresponsible of us to save "too much" of our electronic information because "it is consuming space and resources somewhere," whether it's stored on local hard drives or out there in the cloud somewhere. He argues that the energy demands of our technology are "ominous" and laments the fact that evil data centers are spewing carbon emissions that endanger the planet.

Well ... I have a few quibbles with Dr. Sloane's gloom and doom approach. I don't think the solution is for all of us to stop saving the data that we want to keep. I think the solution (if one is needed) is to find alternative ways to store it. The article makes the assumption that all stored data is sitting on active hard drives that are sucking up electricity. But that's not true. Data stored on optical media such as CDs and DVDs, or on flash memory such as SD cards and USB sticks, or on old-fashioned tape, isn't using any power at all until you access it. Even when it comes to hard drives, you can plug in a USB drive, save your data to it, and then unplug it until you need that data. It doesn't use a bit of energy sitting on the shelf.

Tiered storage systems, or hierarchical storage management (HSM) moves data that's not used as often to optical discs and tape. This not only lowers energy impact for storing data, it also reduces the cost of data storage, so it's a win/win situation. Additionally, even for data that needs to be constantly accessible, server consolidation through virtualization technologies is cutting down considerably on server energy usage. And each generation of new chips consumes less energy than the last.

Finally, there is evidence that the concern over the energy consumed by computers has been blown out of proportion. According to the Energy Information Administration, energy intensity (energy consumed per dollar of real GDP) has dropped dramatically since 1996 - the period during which the Internet went commercial and most households and businesses added computers. This article quotes Dr. Jonathon Koomey, one of the leading experts on resource impacts of information technology, who says "most folks think that the power used by computers is a lot more than it actually is, and that it's growing at incredible rates. Neither one of these beliefs is true, but they reflect a stubborn sense that the economic importance of IT somehow must translate into a large amount of electrical use." Read his entire statement here:
http://www.wxpnews.com/0WJMWV/110405-Internet-Energy-Use

So what do you think? Is saving all your data endangering the planet? Do you need to do a spring cleaning of your hard drive immediately? Should we, as Dr. Sloane suggests, consider ourselves digital hoarders and seek out a 12 step group to help us kick our data-saving habit? Or is it okay to continue making backups of our backups and keeping whatever data we darn well please? Will you start offloading more of your data to media that doesn't actively consume power? Or does it matter? Tell us your opinions and thoughts on this topic. We invite you to discuss it in our forum at
http://www.wxpnews.com/0WJMWV/110405-Discuss-This-Weeks-WXPNews-Here