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  • It's not just hard drive problem. If you buy a new storage rack at your home, it will be full in no time. No matter how many racks you buy, you will always find things fill those racks. This is like rain water filling up the lakes. if there is a lake, it gets filled. Or maybe it is called a lake because it gets filled. So, one can say that the disks create or cause the data. If there is no disk, there is no data.
    by zkmon
  • If you're on Windows, MacOS or Linux, a great tool for interactively discovering and deleting large folders and files is dua:

    https://github.com/Byron/dua-cli

    If you're on MacOS and suspect a lot of space is taken by multiple copies of the same files, use fclones to turn them into APFS clones. (You can also use this on Linux, as ext4 supports hard links, but only if you're sure the duplicates won't diverge.)

    by rahimnathwani
  • Mine is mostly full and it's not stuff I've saved but stuff software has stored there without asking me. It's quite hard to figure what's going on. I once got a message from Chrome saying it couldn't go on because it had stored like 200gb for websites, would I like to delete it all, and I said yes and noticed no difference.

    It's annoying because I'd rather store say family photos than have it full of random junk that means nothing to me. Dunno the answer - better os control? Partition the drive?

    by tim333
  • This is a variation of Parkinson's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law: "Data expands to fill the space available for storage."
    by kmoser
  • I think about this problem often in life because of my tendency to procrastinate. Only the long term effects that cause me serious paranoia get any real attention (failing to meet social expectations, major health issues, large-figure finance problems). It’s absolutely necessary to define the constraints before they define you. This requires a lot of forward thinking and effort but considering how little time we get on this earth… worth it
    by mfro
  • I recently ran `df` and was surprised to see that I'd used more than half of the two terabyte SSD in my laptop. So, being apparently atypically proactive, my first action was delete all of the target directories in my Rust projects and was equally surprised to see that it freed up nearly 10% of my disk usage (~200 GB)!
    by komadori
  • If you're on Windows, WizTree (https://diskanalyzer.com/) is great for figuring out what's consuming your storage space.

    On Linux/macOS you can use `du` from the command line (or ask an AI to make a convenience wrapper for you).

    by throw2ih020
  • "Save" is cheap. "I might need this sometime later."

    Delete is expensive. "Am I positive I'll never need this again?"

    As a consequence, "cheap" actions (saves) accumulate, "expensive" ones (deletes) accrue until cheap becomes expensive as space becomes tight.

    Ultimately, options become:

    - Find criteria for rapidly assessing what data can be deleted.

    - Purchase cheap archival storage and migrate old data to that.

    - A media or device crash induces loss of arbitrarily-selected data.

    by dredmorbius

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