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.