Hoarding: When is it too much?

I was at one time a compulsive data hoarder. I collected huge numbers of files of music that I never listen to, videos that I never watch, audio and print books I never enjoy to and software programs that I would never install or run. I cannot even blame the huge collection on sex. There is absolutely no porn in the entire collection. There is instruction on some obscure programming languages that I have no intention of ever learning.I remember one particular search for an instructional video showing basketball shooting by JJ Redick. After a long online search, culminating in finding it and storing it in a digital format, my son and I never watched the video. My jump shot remained an ugly (but serviceable) mess all the way up to the time when a couple of knee surgeries required that I not try to shoot jumpers anymore.The physical manifestation of my habit was several terabytes of the stuff stored on digital media. I started out with data on floppy disks and then saved my data onto CDs when CD writers became affordable. At one point, I transferred the bulk of it from CD storage to DVD storage. I learned smartphone programming by writing an app to hold a searchable database indexing most of the collection.Of course, all of that excess fits into a footlocker that slides under a bed or fits on the top shelf of a closet. I believe it is an example of the same type of hoarding that fills my MIIL's house full of thrift store stuff that she claims she is going to wear, sell, or give away.On the other hand, my compulsive data gathering could not fill up my house, even though in hindsight the acquiring and saving impulse seems just as strong and pointless as any other hoarding I have seen. It is just that ones and zeroes don't take up much space and data storage does not cost much money. I will probably be moving soon, and I doubt that much of that data will make it to the next house.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I have comics too. More than I will ever read. It seems a very powerful impulse. I have done pro-bono work with the tenant/landland court, and even the threat of eviction in two-weeks is not enough to get some elderly people to let go of stuff they have hoarded. Humans don't seem to have many instinctual behaviors, and many folks seem to be triggered by some loss or event in their lives. That does not seem to explain the disks full of stuff I never find the time to enjoy. Not a space concern, is right. I suppose we'd have to define data hoarding in terms of the number of devices that never get hooked up to the computer after becoming full, instead of the number of rooms full of stuff we can no longer enter.