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)!
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.
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