I am a file hoarder.I have files that were created or downloaded nearly twenty years ago, when I had little drive space and my only option for backup storage was floppies.
Over the years a few have been lost, and some have been permanently deleted because they outlived their usefulness and had no sentimental value. But the collection has steadily grown. Not just photos, music, movies and e-books; I have stashed whole websites, some of which no longer exist on the Web. Reference material, vintage software, clipart, backups of websites that I created, backups of files recovered from other people’s computers (I keep those for at least a year). My writings, fan-fic written by others that I enjoyed reading, half-finished stories, rants, souvenirs of odd occurrences, screenshots of every desktop I ever had, memories of LARTs well done.
It’s interesting to poke around in, and now and then rewarding in unexpected ways. Recently an old Internet friend looked me up. In our email exchange, I mentioned some floppies that she had sent me. She said that the files on them no longer existed on her present computer. I dove straight into my archives, found the files, zipped them up and sent them to her.
Files don’t collect dust. 😉
