As the cost of electronic storage drops in proportion to the increasing affordability of USB drives, hard drives and remote servers, simply saving everything has become an easier choice for consumers and businesses to make.

In a YouTube video, comedy group the Upright Citizens Brigade satirized A&E's series Hoarders with its own "data hoarder" episode.

While the clip pokes fun at a person who saves all of his e-vites and screen savers, data hoarding in an organization is a much more serious problem. By not regularly engaging in list cleansing processes to clear away outdated or inaccurate listings, a company that relies on contact data quality as part of its customer service or for direct marketing purposes could be losing money.

In an interview with IT Business Edge, Ash Ashutosh, the CEO of Actifio, explained that in order to make Big Data or any other data category usable in a business, employees need to "reduce the amount of data to be managed."

Ashutosh also outlined some of the indicators of a data hoarder, including having so much on the system that making a backup copy takes more than a weekend and spending so much time and resources thinking about managing data that there's no room to use that data for performance improvements.