My Bet is That You’re a Hoarder…Me Too.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the series of shows on a couple of different cable networks on hoarding, but they’re pretty interesting looks at the psychological triggers people go through in "collecting" – it seems like so many of the folks that are facing this say something along the lines of
"but I might need it some day…"
as rationalization for keeping this or that item (or massive group of items).
It occurs to me that we nearly all suffer from this same thing with the information in our stores. Think about the amount of data you have. From the transactional data to the reporting and data warehouse information, it’s simply incredible what’s stored. Disk is so inexpensive, processing is so fast, it’s all great incentive to care a whole lot less about what we’re storing, "just in case I might need it some day."
How do you approach this? What metrics, filters or rules do you use to determine what gets kept, what goes away, what gets archived? I know with many systems it’s as simple as a date range, perhaps everything more than 6 months old goes to archive.
It seems to me though that it’s not that simple (here we go with my own data hoarding) – I might need that information to find trends, to realize changes in what people are doing in a business or to recognize products that need more or less emphasis. So how to you approach it? Where is that line and how do you find out what you really need, what you don’t need?
Surely we can’t just keep everything, even with cheap storage. It’s just silly. It piles up on our disks and slows performance and causes backup and restore issues… it’s a mess.