I collect rocks, sand, and shot glasses.

According to the added storage capacity of my bins, I have 192 gallons of movies, video games, books… not including 8 short boxes of comics.

Postage stamps for many years starting as a kid. Steamship postcards, then trilobites and minerals for some years as an adult.

Books.

Coins

Video games - just shy of a 4,000 game collection. It’s a large contribution to my data hording. I like having rom/iso backups of everything in my collection. Same goes for the movies I have, as well as getting digital options for my books, etc…

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The physical items are to display and use when things go offline/break, but the digital versions of my collection are what I use most.

Oh, almost forgot. I apparently collect laptops. My family gets new ones every 3-5 years and I still have every one dating back at least 15 years.

Oh, and cell phones and tablets. Those date back to at least 2011. There’s an iPhone 6 and a couple Android v4 (and earlier) devices within arm’s reach of me right now.

Just Lego really.

Blu-rays and CDs then rip the CDs to flac and hoard and the Blu-rays to image and mkv and hoard.

I collect old computers… mostly the portable variety: Powerbook 3400c, some handsprings, a tandy trs-80 model 100, apple newtons, etc…

I have coffee mugs… a Dr Pepper mug from the 70s or 80s…a Y2K bug mug from, well, y2k, a nasa mug, etc…

Selective Lego sets.

I have 9kg of stickers. Most of them are in their original packaged sheet.

When I was in primary school, we had a sticker chart which had every classmates name on it. The teacher would give us stickers whenever we did something good or achieved something. I had a bunch of my stickers stolen from a couple of bullies and the teacher didn’t really intercept or come up with a solution to stop their incessant harassment. 20 years later I have a galore of different stickers and enjoy looking through them time to time, also trying to use them instead of merely buying/hoarding them, especially to friends or strangers via postcard exchange sites.

I still buy music CDs whenever possible.

And LEGO sets. I love getting unique minifigs and animals.

I sold all my comics years ago to make rent, so aside from a few graphic novels here and there I don’t buy comics any anymore.

I have a large and growing DVD and Blu-ray collection.

That’s the stuff I have physically that could take “less space” if I were to rip them and put them onto a massive HDD NAS.

Why don’t I do that?

• Legally speaking if I were to rip anything I’d need to retain the original disc so…
• I archive to Optical Media as the ultimate storage format so I’d be burning the discs to Blu-ray after ripping them so… Why bother? They are already in their final format. I’m obsessed with light, I prefer optical media, I use cameras, I love binoculars and telescopes, I’ve worn glasses since I was 5, and I’m frequently reminded of my own colourblindness, light is something I’m obsessed with and yes I will never not archive to Optical no matter how many try to remind me if the cost of HDD lol
• I literally have no time. I see something on dvd or Blu-ray or an audio cd and spend less than a few mins buying it. That’s enough. I have 1,001 other things I need to do from fixing the car demister again to doing the hovering to finally going up into the attic to sort out the junk there, or do I sort out the junk in the spare room? Or what about the crap in the shed? I literally have more things to do and deciding not to rip digital media that is not rare (some are and should be backed up) is a welcome relief 😁

I also have many other collections that I maintain and need to add to or remove stuff from. Such as the camera collection, the watch collection, the books, the retro games, the retro computers, the Wedgewood pottery (yes I’m serious), the Lladro and Nao pottery figurines and other antiques that caught my eye.

I’m also a guy who has multiple hobbies since I turned 10 in 1990. I have skills in programming on retro systems I’m looking to re-awaken. I have been an avid photographer that shoots both film and digital to this day, and that hobby is screaming at me as my extensive 35mm and 120 film negatives I have made since the early 90’s are totally unprotected as they have not been scanned and indexed yet! That is exacerbated by the fact I’m still enjoying shooting new film and so adding to the pile.

Oh and that’s another example right there, of what I have physically that would take up “less space” digitally: my negatives. Well even when I finally scan them all I’m still keeping the negatives. The scanning is only to allow me to archive them digitally to Blu-ray and have another copy in Amazon Glacier in case the negatives all burn in the house. If they don’t burn in the house, like the dvd/Blu-ray/CD collection, they will out last me considering that silver halide film is one of the most stable storage methods there is.

So yeah why? Well no time. Just simply no time. The film is waaaaay more important to digitise rather than an out of print audio CD. So I’ll happily keep adding to the stack of CD’s 🤣

Video game manuals. And I’m making them digital so they aren’t lost to time. What’s out there now is such low quality- but at the time (1995-2010) was “good enough” because “it’s something”.

You see, leaving everything sans practicality out, digital is obviously the better choice for general redundancy and uniformity of storage.

However: comics, retro games, other physical media etc. are a whole different thing. I’d keep and display anything worth it. (with a backup scan/rip on a few drives)