What in your hoard do you treasure the most? I imagine to a lot of us it is photos and videos of our families, which I’d love to hear about, but also interested in rare bits of media or information that makes your collection unique.
I have some copies of shows that only received pilot episodes or shorts such as Wet City that I think are pretty rare. For treasured though I’ve got a journal from when I was in high school. A lot of it’s insignificant forgettable stuff like going to the movies with friends but the prompts of setting help me paint a vivid mental image of it that makes me feel a bit nostalgic.
I have emails going back to YAM on Amiga in 2002, some games I wrote for GBA and mobile platforms that don’t exist any more. I have some old IM logs but reading that was so cringe I should delete it, with wipe not rm. Some of the obscure old music I have isn’t available even on Soulseek (except when I’m sharing it). Source code of old programs I and my friends wrote. And photos, of course.
Like most of us, I have plenty of pictures and such that I don’t want to lose. The most important to me, though, are some of the documents that I’ve saved or scanned from years passed. While a tax return from 2003 or the title for a car I owned 20 years ago aren’t exactly useful, it’s fun to occasionally look at some of the old stuff and see how far I have come in my life since then.
Lost music. It was an underground artist who quit in the mid 2010s before archive culture was really a thing. I’ve had people dm me looking for it before. I keep it offline only out of respect for the author who wants to stay gone because the reason he quit a decade ago was harassment.
at the same level of importance, every time I’ve gotten a new computer or operating system since 2013 or so, I’ve backed up every single user folded (pictures, videos, documents, etc) onto an external hard drive. I have a lot of good memories there that I really do not want to lose.
Early computer aided art and programs I’ve written, dating back decades.
In the mid 1990s I used ImpulseTracker to create music. The music sucks. But losing the original source .IT files would be heartbreaking.
Likewise, my first programs, written as a child in MS DOS batch files circa 1991 – basic menu driven interfaces that facilitated launching my installed sharware… I don’t have the games the program points to anymore, but that isn’t the point ;)
Other than family pictures, etc., I’ve been working on a collection of the episodes of a show from when I was a kid in the late 80s, “Long Ago and Far Away”, showing fairy tales from around the world in a variety of art styles and media, with James Earl Jones as host. I’ve found maybe 2/3 of the episodes so far. Every few years I do another sweep to try to find more.
Don’t have any pictures or videotapes from childhood, teen years or even now. Right now, I have some free music downloaded from Bandcamp from some of my favorite indie artists, and that’s what I treasure for now. And a few torrented copies of novel I’ve yet to start reading. And a GBA state files for Final Fantasy 6 from my use of PC emulators, which is probably corrupt by now, as the SD card lives in my phone
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