Confessions of a Digital Hoarder

Welcome to this week’s edition of Cyber Motion, tailored for cybersecurity business leaders. In this newsletter, you’ll find practical strategies, cutting-edge insights, and fresh thinking designed to help your security-focused brand break through a crowded market. My goal is to equip you with the tools and ideas needed to thrive amid shifting threats, buyer skepticism, and evolving industry standards.

– Tobias

Not yet a subscriber? Sign up here.

My newsletter this week is going to be a little different. Okay, a lot different.

Initially I wasn't going to post anything between Christmas and New Year, but a post I started writing on LinkedIn about a large personal project changed my mind. While this is a little outside the norm, I think it still applies to business in a lot of areas.

Let me start with a confession. I'm a digital hoarder. I save all kinds of digital things, in part because they are so easy to save. And so hard to remember that you have.

Since college I've slowly been amassing files of one kind or another on all kinds of media. First on floppy disks and then burnable CDs (remember those things?) and ZIP disks. And always on hard drives.

My digital collecting really started to get out of hand when I owned my marketing agency. Every iteration of every project was saved and carefully backed up. Since much of the work we did was videos and animations, fast local storage was the only real option. That means hard drives. And a lot of them.

The agency grew and filled multiple large RAID arrays, all stuffed with hard drives. As we outgrew certain drive sizes, those drives got bumped down into external enclosures for backups or client file transfers. And eventually I ended up with a whole plastic storage bin full of drives that I was pretty sure had been backed up, but wasn't 100% sure about.

Fast forward a bunch of years. I'd moved on from my agency days and that cache of drives (grown ever larger) was living in my basement. It was a mix of drives that included both personal and professional data. I found drives from as early as 1998 that, miraculously, still booted up.

Several times over the years I'd briefly worked on cleaning up this mess. Most recently I'd taken a crack at it during the pandemic. But I'd always gotten sidetracked by something else. And every time I didn't finish, the pile of drives would grow ever so slightly.

In the early part of 2025, I decided this was the year that the mountain of drives would finally die. I first set about figuring out what I really wanted to save and what could go away forever. Then I implemented a process of zeroing out each drive before physically damaging or destroying it. Finally with the drives as unrecoverable as I could reasonably make them, they got taken to be recycled.

I'm imagining that by this point you are skimming the article to see if I ever say how many hard drives we're talking about. Let's put it this way, I lost count around 56 drives. At some point I found a few more drives in another tote and didn't remember if they were in the original count. We'll just say it was more than 55 and less than 60.

It looks like I'm just going to meet my end of the year deadline. The last couple drives are sitting next to the computer, queued up to be erased, and there's a small stack of zeroed out drives waiting for me to tear them apart and haul to the recycling place.

At some point, projects that aren't completed seem to take on a life of their own. Getting them done feels more and more daunting every time we think about the thing that is lurking, still not done. The scale grows bigger every time we start and then have to stop, for whatever reason.

Eventually, you just have to decide that now is the time to tackle the thing. And you have to push through until it is done.

Whatever beast you've been putting off slaying, make now the time.

Happy New Year,
Tobias