Funny you'd say that. I keep a folder with gigabytes of youtube videos I downloaded in the event that they are removed from youtube. And, to tell you the truth, a chunk of them have actually been removed from youtube over the years!
I have 40 year old VHS tapes that are still good, vinyl records last a long time too.
Think of all these pictures we snap with our phones.
Most of them will probably be lost from disk drive failures, accidental erasure, hardware failures making them too expensive to recover, software obsolescence (pictures are on the device but they don't make the software to connect to the device any more)...
Meanwhile I have a box of family pictures, some of them from the 19th century (a few tin types), but most of them from the 20th century, that are still good most with negatives intact. I could print a brand new print of any of them anytime I want.
> Meanwhile I have a box of family pictures, some of them from the 19th century (a few tin types), but most of them from the 20th century, that are still good most with negatives intact. I could print a brand new print of any of them anytime I want.
This is really where cloud storage solves those problems. The photos I care about are shared with friends and family and are safe from hardware failure or house fire. The only scenario they aren't great at is the inter-generational one, but if dad gives kids access it's no worse than a shoebox under the bed. They'll just have to pull stuff down into their own digital lockers before MasterCard and Google realize I'm dead.
But seriously: Stuff disappears, not doubt, although if I remember something I can usually still find it online. I virtually never search something in the stuff I downloaded for years, because it is just easier to dig it up online - and that is not because my archive wouldn't be accessible. If it is important for me to remember it is probably important for others to keep it online.
With time I've learnt that not even archive.org is reliable for some things so I save whatever I can. Sometimes I even take screenshots of things that I may need someday.
I've never stopped to think of that as "hoarding", but probably it is. Thank God those files don't take physical space at home, though!
Do you mean you are happy that the files don't take up physical space at home like books do or do you mean they don't take up space because you store them in the cloud. The last thing would really make a difference because I think it's something old people like me don't typically do.