Yeah, you are unusual in my view. :) My mom, who barely uses the computer - and has a laptop, was able to get up to 200 GB within 6 months. How? Simple -- videos and pictures she takes of the kids from her smartphone, that she insists be saved and archived. That's my mom.

I, on the other hand, am running out of free space on my 4TB capacity desktop, and will be purchasing larger storage devices soon.

I've been running a 256gb SSD in my Macbook and haven't come remotely close to hitting that limit.

In my case it's my secondary computer, so I don't see a need to store much in the way of media (Movie, Music) etc on it, which is about the only way I imagine I would use that much space.

The OS and Applications takes up a decent chunk, as does VirtualBox, but other than that it's just documents and source code.

I'm an engineer & I've been using a single 60gb SSD for over a year. I run a few virtual machines and when I'm done I delete shit I don't need or store it elsewhere. What do you use 4TB for? I could only imagine using it for watching TV but I don't like doing that. Everything else I just rent cheap servers.

Music, games, movies alone easily take up like 3TB out of the 4TB. Big software (3d cad software, some gfx software, etc.) take up a TB. One of the NI instrument collections (http://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/bundl...) is like 100GB (I forget which one, I think it's the Piano one with the soundbank) -- that's just a single one. If you're working with media stuff, it's way too easy to find even 20TB to not be enough for your needs. And I'm just an amateur for goodness' sake!

Oh, and I have an external 3TB drive where I house all of my backups and captures of old desktops. It's completely full, and I will be purchasing another ~3TB drive in the near future for backup purposes.

Yeah I understand it now! Those instruments are "tools" :-) A music collection is also understandable, but I generally stream, since various services I can run simply from my work environment (Emacs). I'm sort of scared to even get a 1TB disk because I'd worry about introducing distractions. I've liked the constraints 60gb has imposed on me. However, admittedly, as I've started contracting around various places each which has different environments, it'd probably soon upgrade to a 128Gb in order to do the "context switching" between the various virtual machines with Vagrant I need to get work done in various places, in the past I've managed to solve that by just having a development server at cheap places like Online.net, but it's nice to have the virtual environment locally to get around the typing delay caused by ping time in a terminal.

You have wayyy too much data. You're a straight up digital hoarder. You couldn't even sift through that shit in a lifetime, let alone use it all.

Making full disk backups and archiving huge collections of media assets you'll only ever use 1% of is just a huge burden of mind and a huge loss of portability and flexibility. Not to mention a waste of time and money.

I know you say you're an amateur as if professionals would have even more, but in reality, they've probably realized what a time sink it is and focused on just the small set of stuff that actually matters.

I'm not really sure you're getting downvoted, since your point of view is pretty reasonable (even if many will disagree with it), and you've expressed it fairly respectfully.

It's not just an opinion, it's exaggerated to the point of being factually wrong and bearing little resemblance to a reasonable point. I think the downvoting is reasonable. Here, I'll go through various points:

"You couldn't even sift through that shit in a lifetime, let alone use it all." "media assets you'll only ever use 1% of"

Assume someone's daily routine involves 3 hours (below average) of TV/movies, in HD. 5-6GB a day, 3TB is reached in under two years. 1% of 3TB is reached in a single week. Even hanging on to a small fraction of the media they watch for future viewing/sharing would fill up 3TB in a handful of years.

"Making full disk backups and archiving huge collections of media assets you'll only ever use 1% of is just a huge burden of mind and a huge loss of portability and flexibility."

Managing full disk backups means buying a disk and pointing an automated program at the folders you want. Average time per week: 0 minutes.

Managing huge collections of media assets: This means navigating services to click on movies and shows to download, and occasionally moving a season into a different folder. Average time per week: 5 minutes.

Burden of mind: Remember to buy a drive every several years, otherwise none.

Loss of portability: Keep it on an external drive if you want portability? Not sure what is meant here.

"Not to mention a waste of time and money."

Tell that to anyone with basic cable, as far as watching the content goes. Storing it after watching has negligible additional time/money cost.

Now do you see what the problem is with that comment? While it's certainly possible to be a digital hoarder, having two shelf's worth of movies on a hard drive is extremely weak evidence toward that.

I'm just going off my 3TB disk - its only 2TB full, though. I do have it backed up three times over at three different locations when I get the time to truck my external drive around to do so.

75GB of TV 300GB of Movies 80GB of Music 9GB Pictures 8GB Code 140GB Games 84GB OS Images 64GB Installers (I rip game cds so I don't have to keep the discs around) 60GB VMs 50GB Containers 2GB Books 2GB Comics 200MB Documents 4GB Misc Audio 14GB Misc Video 240GB of cross-device backups

This stuff adds up. If I actually ripped my entire music, tv, and movie collection I'd easily fill up the rest of the disk. Mostly I'm just impatient about only 20MB/s reads off old cds and dvds.

This is exactly me -- ~2TB of 3TB storage full, similar content to you. The difference is that I store all that stuff on a RAIDed NAS device and stream it over wifi when I need it.

I don't back it up, but it is RAIDed with 1-disk fault tolerance, and that's pretty much good enough for me. I mostly only ever add new content to the NAS or read existing ones, so I'm not worried about versioning.

Best of both worlds imo.

Yeah, it adds up if you're too obsessed with archiving to actually cull some of it. Most movies are only worth watching once. Most music collections are too big. Most photos are duplicates and/or out of focus. Most games are replaced by much better ones.

I deleted a few hundred GB of movies a while back and realized I didn't even need a multi-terrabyte drive at all. Feels good man.

Media. I can probably about as much data in 1 minute with a DSLR as I can create in a lifetime on editing text files.

Does your mum need to carry around 200GB+ of movies and pictures? would she get by fine with a multi-TB drive on the network at home and a smaller laptop hard drive.

In theory this setup would be perfect. In practice it is a nightmare because the software makes managing media split across multiple file systems that may or may not be available at any given time very hard. It is particularly bad within the Apple ecosystem. iPhoto really wants your entirely library in one folder on one disk. The iCloud photo stream options do well at syncing but cannot handle the model of store all my photos in the cloud and cache the recently taken/commonly used ones locally.

There are cloud services that solve this but they have their own set of issues. Many are expensive compared to basic direct/network attached storage, others require photos to be public, others come with dubious guarantees that they will still exist next year.

I get a call from my sister with a 128GB MacBook Air every month or two asking to remind her how to move her baby photos/videos to her external drive. Every time we do it I am surprised how complicated and error prone the process is (we've managed to accidentally permanently delete photos). If anyone has a good recommendation for an alternative to iPhoto (and not cloud based) that understands the concept of archiving photos to a network/usb disk that is not always present I would love to hear them.

Aperture can do it, and as iPhoto's big brother isn't too much of a leap for people used to that.

Have you tried Time Machine and found it wanting?

It supports both network and impermanently attached usb disks.

Your mom should never be storing 200GB of data on a hard drive. Thats Wrong(tm) because baking up properly is difficult enough when you have a team of sysadmins.

Instead, she should be using a private youtube for her videos, and Flickr for photos. The rest should fit in a dropbox account. Not only will her data have a team of professionals trying to prevent the inevitable fuck-up, and she'll enjoy 'cloud' benefits, but also she'll have a chance to curate her collection during upload, because no one has enough time in their life to look at 200GB of home movies and photos every 6 months (it's turning into a landfill)

> Your mom should never be storing 200GB of data on a hard drive. Thats Wrong(tm) because baking up properly is difficult enough when you have a team of sysadmins.

It is much thanks to me that she does not up it on the cloud. I don't trust cloud services, so that's what I suggest to her -- I'm happy to sysadmin her devices whenever she needs me to though.

I hope in the future there are truly Easy-to-use-for-moms storage devices, along with the software to go with them, that gives them all the benefits cloud may have.

Sure, and when Youtube decides to change their policies, and Dropbox goes bankrupt, then she has.... nothing. Hard drives are cheap. Run a backup service and you have no worries.

Doesn't Time Capsule count as a backup? It's not difficult. https://www.apple.com/airport-time-capsule/

Where do you store your pictures and home movies? A movie of an event is near 1GB in HD.

Some people don't take pictures or videos. I take the occasional ephemeral photo of my dog doing something stupid. I have maybe 20 photos that I know of from the last year or two and they're all of stupid crap. On my phone. At least 25% of those photos are of my dog mid-yawn. Not kidding.

However, I do have something like 6TB of active desktop storage (not including NAS) at capacity because of software, audio samples, disk images, virtual machines, backups, documentaries and shows, etc.

Everyone just uses computers differently. My mom's storage is something like 2TB and I think about 70% of it is home movies and photos. The remaining 30% are duplicates of some of the same files, likely on the same disk in different directories.

I have a NAS with 3TB of RAID storage. When iCloud automatic backup complains that my phone is running low, I download the camera roll to there.

If I'm making a home movie, I'll just copy the files to the SDD temporarily. I have 30GB+ free most of the time.

Flickr. 1TB for free (although I'm a grandfathered pro user at $25/year).