Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Harddrive Is Probably Full

marginalia.nu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 49 posts

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#11

Post by RugnirViking »

throw2ih020 wrote: post #9
AKSF_Ackermann wrote: post #6

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 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.

What video game!? I've seen games that reach up to the already crazy number of 100gb, but I usually just don't install those, with few exceptions

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#13

Post by 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.)

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#14

Post by efilife »

AKSF_Ackermann wrote: post #6

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 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 enough

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#15

Post by phendrenad2 »

throw2ih020 wrote: post #12

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).

DaisyDisk is also a great option on Mac.

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#16

Post by 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.

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#18

Post by nubinetwork »

throw2ih020 wrote: post #12

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).

> 46x faster than windirstat

Thats a pretty bold claim, but is it really that much faster?

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#19

Post by nxrabl »

nubinetwork wrote: post #18
throw2ih020 wrote: post #12

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).

> 46x faster than windirstat Thats a pretty bold claim, but is it really that much faster?

It is - it ‘cheats’ by reading off the NTFS MFT, similarly to another indispensable piece of Windows software Everything Search, both of which I miss keenly on my underprovisioned work Mac.

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#20

Post by goodmythical »

throw2ih020 wrote: post #12

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).

I've yet to encounter any issues with gdu for linux. Highly reccomended
Post reply on HN