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.