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- Hacker News
- And i am wondering what do people even fill their storage with, and why do they need so much. In my case it is ~200-300 out of 1TB on 2 laptops, 37 out of 128gb on phone. And i don't even actively manage it.
- Photos, movies, MP3, SDKs for various kinds of systems, PDFs (and PS) of computing papers collected during the last 35 years, and naturally games.by pjmlp
- My photo library is around 700 gb.by msh
- I have 2TB filled and I need more. I make music so I need a lot of storage for my instruments and samples. This is measured in tens and often hundreds of gigabytes. I also play games. Games' sizes range wildly from 10 to 200 GBs. I also do gamedev. The textures get big and get duplicated between projects. Programming (npm modules for example), add to this personal data, media archives and 2TB is not enoughby efilife
- I have one single video game I play that takes up around 650GB, so I have a dedicated drive for it. And between 1 and 2 TB of movies, TV, and photos. Everything else is ephemeral/scratch space for whatever I'm working on.
I used to be into amateur movie making and editing, and back then I needed many TB of space for the stuff I pulled off my cameras before it got edited down.
by throw2ih020 - Asked Claude to look at my full disk. Thought for 1 minute
It found 114GB of Hugging Face models, 17GB worth of models in an obscure app I tested once. In places I would've never thought to look.
I'd never have never found these myself.
Problem solved. For now!
by cadamsdotcom - > 20+ years of software engineering experience across full-stack, backend, infrastructure, Site Reliability Enigneering, and AI engineering. Past work includes Uber, Airbnb, Canva, and a wide variety of startups - several of which I co-founded.
> I'd never have never found these myself.
You are either the most experienced most incompetent software engineer in the world, or you are lying.
by Hendrikto - Just looking with ncdu/du or another tool which sorts folders by size would have been much faster and easier, was there any need to use Claude here?by Azantys
- My harddrive at 1tb has around the same amount of free space in % as my previous computer with just 256gb.
- I have less than one terabyte of disk space, and less than 10% of the full capacity is in use, so it is closer to being empty. (The hard drives they sell have more capacity than I require.) And, there are files that I do not use (some of which come with the operating system, such as PulseAudio).
- 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.)
- 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 itby 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
- I’ve also noticed this with rust. Those target directories can get huge.by tyleo
- Are there many tiny files? They may take 4KiB of space each even though they're less than a KiB big (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_sector).
On a SanDisk portable SSD I own, the cluster size is even 4MiB. If you put a node modules directory in there with thousands of tiny files, it can "take up" several GiB of space.
by netsharc - 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 - I like erdtree or dust instead of du.by satvikpendem
- > 46x faster than windirstat
Thats a pretty bold claim, but is it really that much faster?
by nubinetwork - I've yet to encounter any issues with gdu for linux. Highly reccomendedby goodmythical
- DaisyDisk is also a great option on Mac.by phendrenad2
- I've been using SpaceMonger (220 KB) since... Win95 I think.by M95D
- Yes, I always use `du . -h 2>/dev/null | sort -k1hr | head -nN` where that last N is however many directories I want to show. I run this regularly and have for a very long time precisely because of the issue that the post talks about.by 59nadir
- On Linux, ncdu is really good in the terminal. Filelight on KDE and Baobab on Gnome are really nice GUIs.by jraph
- "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