Harddrive Is Probably Full

mfro

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

ThrowawayTestr

I bought a 8tb drive just before prices exploded so I'm alright

kmoser

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."

komadori

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)!

AKSF_Ackermann

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.

victorbjorklund

My harddrive at 1tb has around the same amount of free space in % as my previous computer with just 256gb.

throw2ih020

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).

rahimnathwani

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.)

dredmorbius

"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.

effnorwood

probably. wish there was a way to find out. hint: not logs or updates.

cadamsdotcom

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!

tim-tday

The problem with filling up a ssd is that it writes and rewrites the same blocks over and over defeating the built in wear leveling. Filling an ssd creates the one situation where nand wear out is a problem.

zzo38computer

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).

notorandit

... and It is ok. I bought 16TB disk because I needed that much storage. If I were using, say, only 10TB, I would be wasting 6TB. I can expand my LVM as much as I can. But I definitely want my disk to be full. Same goes for my RAM. And I want my CPU ide time to stay as close as possible to 0% and my load average as close as possible to my no. of CPUs. Anything else would mean oversizing and overspending.