"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.

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)!

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

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).

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.)

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."

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

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.

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