CFUD wrote: "I've dreaded this day.
I mean, I knew it would come some day but when it does come,
it hits you. More than you can ever imagine.
And so, I say goodbye to my 4TB collection of JAV and hentai.
4TB of torrenting, stupid catchpas and babysitting those downloads in Jdownloader.
That neatly indexed archive sorted by actress name.
All those moment will be lost...like tears...in rain."
I feel you man (or rather, ages later this is something I can sympathize with!)
In 2020 one of my external hard drives decided to commit suicide, quite suddently and without warning.
This hard drive was not only the most complete and comprehensive collection of porn accumulated since 2002 online (back in the floppy disc days!) - be it mainstream USA-Canada-Foreign(Europe) porn, but also amateur material (including complete collections of amateurs who have since disapeared and erased all their stuff), as well as 3-D animated porn, shemales and other TS-oriented stuff, but also my own porn which I had been shooting since the previous hard drive suicide (the 1st one was back in 2012).
After the 2020 hard drive disaster, I decided that my years (decades?) as a porn archivist were over. I even threw away my dozens upon dozens of CDr/DVDr folders from the pre-external drive days, hundreds upon hundreds of discs also now long gone.
Following suit was my VHS porn collection: sometime between 2008 to 2016 an aquaintance asked me to help him move a collector's VHS collection he had been storing since the eighties. My payment was I could keep as many of these VHS taps as I wanted. I only had room for about 100 so I chose those rarest ones, including films dubbed in french which were distributed in Quebec (Canada) but never in the US so never released on digital nor DVD, and "did not exist" in the porn databases online.
Needless to say that these also included films which were not taken off the market in that 1986 FBI mega-case: the controversy did not reach Canada until later so many VHS rental stores never took those off the shelves until the arrival of newer titles or DVDs.
... And that Roy Batty quote is the one I use EVERY TIME I post a random "salvage" post on my blog (before throwing away those CDrs and DVDs I spend a weekend randomly uploading stuff on my blog which I release once in a while just to remind everyone of the countless forgotten gems unavailable online anymore which I had to get rid of...)
So peace be with you comerade (or cammarade as some say here in Qc), I feel that pain...