As Hannover Messe 2012 draws to a close here in sunny Lower Saxony, German TV viewers were gripped by last night's edition of Deutschland's Schlechteste Über-Daten-Hamsterers!, (trans: Germany's Worst Super Data Hoarders) the reality show which features 'ordinary' (but bonkers) people who cannot face-up to discarding redundant computer data.

Host Mitzi Meyers' subject this time was Steffi, a 36-year-old biochemist and part-time webmeistress from a Berlin suburb who obsessively retains all her PC log files: she has millions of such sets going back to her time at university, including all of those from various websites she has administered over the last 15 years. Unlike her fellow data hoarder Günther featured in Tuesday's show (see Buzzsore's 25 April 2012 post), Steffi has the wherewithal to migrate her data onto successively more up-to-date storage media, and has reached the stage where she keeps RAID devices under the floorboards of her small terraced haus.

Also unlike Günther, Steffi remained for most of the programme in staunch denial that she had any kind of problem - "It is not so much that I want to keep all my data, it is just that I do not want to delete any of it," she explained tearfully into the camera. To help Steffi come to terms with her data-doting psychosis Mitzi took her to a data de-duplication consultant in Stuttgart who helped take the first painful steps on the road to recovery: excising all the third and fourth copies of files alone slimmed-down her data sets by several gigabytes, and alles war gut for Steffi; but not for your blogger, who channel-hopped to a Spanish TV documentary about a tribe of Intellectual Pygmies who, a bearded anthropologist explained, worship Melvyn Bragg's BBC Radio 4 programme 'In Our Time', which they listen to every week on an ancient crystal set that was salvaged from a crashed biplane sometime in the 1940s.

Edited: 27 April 2012 at 06:29 PM by James Hayes