Hitting Delete

My laptop decided it was no longer interested in functioning like a rational computing machine a few days ago, requiring me to upgrade my operating system to something more current. In the process I had to move everything off my hard drive, which has around 100 GB of storage capacity, to a spare removable drive that was around 32 GB. I was 20 GB over, and didn't have the time to try any alternate online options. This meant I had to clean house.

As you might expect, video files were responsible for the bulk of the clutter. I have some personal videos, but the real problems is that I have a habit of saving videos from the internet I like, especially when it's not certain that I'll be able to access them again. I've got a pretty big collection of fan-made Anime Music Videos (AMVs) from my otaku days, for instance. There's no formal distribution for these things and creators can disappear off the face of the earth without warning, taking their content with them. Because of the legal gray area these works exist in, a fan-made video posted on Youtube might get suddenly pulled down or rendered unwatchable on without any warning. I've made Youtube playlists to bookmark interesting fan videos, and came back after a few months to find half of the entries removed. There are a couple of dedicated archives devoted to AMVs and fanvids and mash-ups, but these can disappear quickly too. The only way to be sure you'll be able to access to fan-made content whenever you want is to hold on to a copy, just in case.

Of course, I didn't just save fan-made content. I kept a brief four-minute clip from a 2005 episode of "The Daily Show," where one of my old employers made an appearance (incorrectly identified, to our office's amusement). It's currently available through the Comedy Central website, but who knows for how long? The clip is part of a rambling opening monologue, not the kind of content that can be bundled onto home media and sold, as "The Daily Show" has done with some of their other pieces. Viacom could decide at some point that it's not worth their while to keep the eight-year-old clip online, and I'd lose the proof of a near-brush with fame. Lots of other memorable content is ephemeral and often hard to access after the initial broadcasts - commercials, award ceremony clips, idents, news reports, talk show segments, specials, local programming, and more. And there are always those obscurities that never make it to home media, or quickly go out of print. "Mickey Mouse in Vietnam," the famous 1960s underground anti-Vietnam protest cartoon resurfaced online a few months ago after decades of rumors and whispers about who might still have one of the rare prints. Better make a backup copy, before it disappears again.

Then you come to the realization, as I did, that this is hoarding behavior. Most of my fears about losing access to all this content are unfounded. The Internet has done a great job of preserving all sorts of unlikely media bits and pieces, just waiting to be stumbled over and rediscovered again. More and more old movies and shows find their way to some kind of official release every day. With the new prevalence of streaming services, the costs have come down across the board. Many of the long-forgotten shows I watched as a kid are on Netflix and Hulu right now. The fan-created content has also been making plays for increased legitimacy, and it's exceedingly rare that something worthwhile will disappear without a trace forever. In fact, I keep coming across kids sharing older AMVs that have been in circulation for over a decade by now.

So I commenced the long-overdue purge of my hard drive. I dumped the clips I knew I was never going to rewatch. I dumped everything that was high-profile enough that I was confident I'd be able to find them online again, with a little digging. Official music videos, movie trailers, election season parodies, and most of the commercials went into the Trash Bin. Goodbye, epic Blackcurrant Tango advert. So long, "Mickey Mouse in Vietnam." I still kept that "Daily Show" clip, though, and a good chunk of the AMVs - many of them unlabeled or mislabeled to such an extent that reassembling the collection would have been a massive undertaking. In the end I cleared out enough to transfer the rest to the external drive with a lot of room to spare.

Inevitably I'll fill up the hard drive again, and I'll have to clean it all out again at some point in the future. But considering how much fun I had this round, going back and revisiting all that content, I'm not too worried about it.
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