Diagraphephobia



Diagraphephobia (also known as Delephobia and Cyberdispophobia) is the fear of deletion, deleting files or data loss (via deletion, accidental deletion, files getting deleted by siblings, ransomware, overwrite, factory reset, hard drive getting eaten by a dinosaur, etc). It can also be believing that you are living inside a video game or computer simulation, and being afraid that you are going to get deleted from existence. The fear of being deleted yourself is Autodiagraphephobia. Summed up, this phobia applies to the fear of having your important documents, photos, or other files deleted or living as a file, photo or a document inside a computer and getting deleted yourself. This phobia may be developed as a side effect of Disposophobia or physical hoarding.

Some people with Diagrephephobia can't delete any minor file including cache files. Some people with this phobia could delete files if a backup exists. This is also known to cause digital hoarding, which isn’t neccisarly as bad as real life hording, but normal “digital hoarders” download lots of data, usually as the goal as archiving. Most diagrephephobes do not do this.

They might also hoard physical electronic devices (or only electronic storage media, like cellphones).

Some programmers with this cant delete code when they need to "start over" and instead comment out the code.

Most people with Diagraphephobia display intense anxiety and fear when asked to delete old and unwanted/unnecessary files. They might show following signs of anxiety/panic attacks with symptoms of restlessness, rapid breathing and heartrate, screaming, running away or hiding rather than deleting the files, getting extremely distressed, and becoming nauseated at the thought of deleting files. Some People with diagraphephobia have trouble organizing digital data manually.

Data affected by this phobia usually is photos and emails, but may extend to documents, contacts, bookmarks, browsing history, and all other data.

Unlike dispophobia, there are no safety or health risks caused by diagraphephobia except tab hoarding, which causes computers to overheat and create burns.

Causes
The phobia is usually caused by a past traumatic experience related to data loss, usually caused by losing game saves, photos & videos, or other data on a tablet by late Gen Z or all of Gen Alpha or losing game saves on a console for early Gen Z and all Millennials. This can slowly cause the sufferer to contract diagraphephobia and fear deletion of data on all electronic devices. If left unchecked, the sufferer may gain Dispophobia.

Trivia

 * Despite having it's namesake related to a song in the Nintendo Wii Mii Funkin Eteled Friday Night Funkin modification, Diagraphephobia does not have any correlation to Friday Night Funkin' or the Wii Deleted You creepypasta, other than the song going by the same name. For clarification, both the mod and creepypasta's story revolves around the idea of a mii character named Eteled being trapped inside a haunted wii and though he can come back after deletion, it physically and mentally pains him, so that he won't be deleted he purposely scares and disturbs the wii owner as a punishment, if deleted.
 * The maximum extent of this phobia is not being able to press the backspace button to delet a single letter they missed and would rather use the arrow keys to do so or autocorrect.
 * Most members of the r/datahoarder subreddit do not suffer this fear. The subreddit is about archiving large amounts of data as a hobby.

Treatment
People with mild diagraphephobia is often treated using talk therapy and other psychiatric interventions. Severe sufferers are often treated using anti-obsession medication, as well as cognitive-behavioral therapy.