Time to clean out HDD's

[wizardofid]

I have about 10TB in HDD's filled to the brim with useless stuff I no longer use, drivers for hardware I no longer have. Applications I no longer use or isn't even supported under windows 10. A steam library of over 500 games which 90% I have even played for longer then a few minutes at a time, taking up a whopping 2.5 TB in HDD space.

I have been hoarding content, for the last 20 years, at the start of the week decided enough, I am deleting and trimming the steam library, got it down to 123 games, which still uses about 1.5tb in hardware space.

Worked related stuff, amounts to over 2 TB in research images, back up content, and other stuff that was useful at one point or another.
Last project I worked on contains over 180 gig in raw photoshop files.

What I am hoping to attempt is to delete enough stuff, for a double back up of essential stuff, to take offline in the event of some thing happening. I Have my entire steam library backed up on a offline storage which I update every 6 months or so with the new updates and stuff.

At what point have you decided to stop hoarding or clean out HDD's ?

 

[Willie Trombone]

/came for a bargain
/left disappointed

But back on topic. The internet is just a big hard drive

 

[r4nd0m]

2 TB in research images

Uh huh.

 

[ProfA]

I have about 10TB in HDD's filled to the brim with useless stuff I no longer use, drivers for hardware I no longer have. Applications I no longer use or isn't even supported under windows 10. A steam library of over 500 games which 90% I have even played for longer then a few minutes at a time, taking up a whopping 2.5 TB in HDD space.

I have been hoarding content, for the last 20 years, at the start of the week decided enough, I am deleting and trimming the steam library, got it down to 123 games, which still uses about 1.5tb in hardware space.

Worked related stuff, amounts to over 2 TB in research images, back up content, and other stuff that was useful at one point or another.
Last project I worked on contains over 180 gig in raw photoshop files.

What I am hoping to attempt is to delete enough stuff, for a double back up of essential stuff, to take offline in the event of some thing happening. I Have my entire steam library backed up on a offline storage which I update every 6 months or so with the new updates and stuff.

At what point have you decided to stop hoarding or clean out HDD's ?

Never. 20TB worth of stuff. Another 20TB of the exact same crap as a back up. When I ran short of cash to buy more hard drives, I simply re-downloaded content with better compression to make some space. Cash is looking good again so will just carry on as before. Buy more hard drives.

 

[wizardofid]

/came for a bargain
/left disappointed

But back on topic. The internet is just a big hard drive

Lol completely the opposite....

 

[wizardofid]

Never. 20TB worth of stuff. Another 20TB of the exact same crap as a back up. When I ran short of cash to buy more hard drives, I simply re-downloaded content with better compression to make some space. Cash is looking good again so will just carry on as before. Buy more hard drives.

Yeah no I am getting fed up with that.Use to do that with DVD's had about 15+ flip folders which held a 100 dvd's, would go to to the fleamarket once a month and buy two 50 DVD spindles, and back up all the content for the month and delete.

faster internet has made that sort of redundant now.So much wasted space, for what ?

Uh huh.

3D modeling, requires quite a bit of research images and texture examples ect.Handy to have them around offline as you don't have to search the internet every time and you generally just select the best images for a particular theme ect.On average I do 5-6Tb worth of raw content a year which gets replaced by the final compressed and game ready versions.

You also have to setup a texture library as you do end up reusing a fair bit of content and royal free content is hard to come by.

 

[furpile]

I Have my entire steam library backed up on a offline storage which I update every 6 months or so with the new updates and stuff.

Why back up Steam games? You can download it again whenever you want to play it?

 

[KantSnyer]

Got stuck into sorting out the photo's which was long overdue, backing them up online. Don't bother keeping backups of games, movies or applications as those can be downloaded/streamed if needed.

 

[TheMightyQuinn]

Why back up Steam games? You can download it again whenever you want to play it?

Backing up in progress games? Can you do that?

 

[Willie Trombone]

Lol completely the opposite....

Why not? One drive, Dropbox, etc work well.

 

[Alton Turner Blackwood]

My laptop SSD is 240GB, everything else is stored on a Google Drive unlimited instance.

 

[wizardofid]

Why back up Steam games? You can download it again whenever you want to play it?

I am on capped data. .The bigger issue if you haven't been following is that next year should see game sizes tripling if not more. 200gig to 450gig a game, we aren't quite ready for that amount of data in south Africa.

Got stuck into sorting out the photo's which was long overdue, backing them up online. Don't bother keeping backups of games, movies or applications as those can be downloaded/streamed if needed.

Well certain paid for application is no longer available, or specific version of the software, for example Cyberlink power DVD back in the day, I think version 4 was awesome, till they started screwing around with it making various changes after that it sucked.

Some of my game development tools are fking expensive and new versions aren't free always, most have shifted to a subscription based services and I refuse to be milked like that, unless I can help it so often use the last versions of software and supplement with free software if I need to do things I am not able to do in older software.

So quite important to have that backed up.

 

[garyc]

It isn't about how much data you have, but if it is sorted well enough that you can get to anything you want. A single HDD will hold all of your stuff but it will probably take some time to sort it out.

Here was my progression over time:

Ended up with a shelf full of 5.25 inch floppy disks, converted hem to a box of 3.5 inch stiffy disks.
Ended up with two shelves full of 3.5 inch disks, converted them to two CD ROMs.
The folders full of CD ROMs multiplied until they ended up on an external drive.
After a while the growing collection of external and internal drives went onto a server with four drives.
Have just bought a NAS.

This is a life-long struggle.

 

[saor]

At what point have you decided to stop hoarding or clean out HDD's ?

Since I've had always-on reasonably fast internet.
Just don't see the point - anything I want I can download.

 

[ProfA]

Since I've had always-on reasonably fast internet.
Just don't see the point - anything I want I can download.

You sound like a person that thought Eskom would always be able to supply electricity 24/7

 

[|tera|]

Since I've had always-on reasonably fast internet.
Just don't see the point - anything I want I can download.

Same here.
I see no point in storing something that will receive an update a few times later.

It's counter productive.

 

[furpile]

Backing up in progress games? Can you do that?

If you turn on sync your saves gets uploaded to Steam, not sure but I think it stays there even if you uninstall the game. But he is talking about the actual games.

A steam library of over 500 games which 90% I have even played for longer then a few minutes at a time, taking up a whopping 2.5 TB in HDD space.

I am on capped data. .The bigger issue if you haven't been following is that next year should see game sizes tripling if not more. 200gig to 450gig a game, we aren't quite ready for that amount of data in south Africa.

If you don't play them or plan on playing them just delete. I have not seen that increase in game size yet, but I can imagine it happening due to 4K/8K textures. And because games are moving away from install media to download only, so they are not limited to a certain capacity anymore. But this will not affect your old games you already have. And if you are going to start backing up games at 450GB each you will need more HDD's. Or maybe a tape drive.

Anyway, back to your actual question, I have a few small HDD's from over time, and bought a 3 TB a few years ago for my Plex library. That got full way to quickly, but I just delete stuff I already watched, because I don't watch the same series again. Will probably get one more big HDD at some point to consolidate the small ones and leave it at that.

 

[wizardofid]

If you turn on sync your saves gets uploaded to Steam, not sure but I think it stays there even if you uninstall the game. But he is talking about the actual games.





If you don't play them or plan on playing them just delete. I have not seen that increase in game size yet, but I can imagine it happening due to 4K/8K textures. And because games are moving away from install media to download only, so they are not limited to a certain capacity anymore. But this will not affect your old games you already have. And if you are going to start backing up games at 450GB each you will need more HDD's. Or maybe a tape drive.

Anyway, back to your actual question, I have a few small HDD's from over time, and bought a 3 TB a few years ago for my Plex library. That got full way to quickly, but I just delete stuff I already watched, because I don't watch the same series again. Will probably get one more big HDD at some point to consolidate the small ones and leave it at that.

Actually it isn't due to 4k/8k textures.Even now games are using RGB textures, where the textures are layered in the diffuse texture RGB channels, massively reducing the overall memory and space costs. Using RGB textures reduces 4 gig of textures to 2gig, meaning you can throw even more assets and textures at the GPU. Game size increases are more due to the complexity of game geometry and assets, as well as media not having to be compressed as much as they use to be, then there are things like assets shader cache which take up the brunt of the space.

The pace at which game development is moving is insane. Personally moving to a new tool That will be released in September that makes use of 64bit, realtime lighting and RGB texturing, which triple the amount of complexity I am use to now as well as double the output size of final games.

Call of duty is already rocking 200 gigs a game. Considering the size of SSD's these days and the size of HDD's 450gig a game is minor, not that every one can afford that amount of space, but to the midrange/high end game rig wouldn't even make a dent.

However if you don't have access to fixed LTE or fixed broadband access, 10 gig is 10 gig so while I had the entire steam library backed up, I decided there is really no point in having both drives have the entire library installed.

Largest game I currently have installed is Doom, so I have reduced the games to ones I am likely to play in the near future and removed the ones I am not likely to play any time soon.

From most people's point of view it is stupid to have things on a hdd, but on capped data, where things cost money and can escalate price wise, losing a 5gig file ends up costing some real money at the end of the day, so yeah it isn't even remotely stupid to have a back up drive with an entire steam library of over 500 games @2.5tb backed up, when on capped data.

To give you some idea, for the last 5700 hours I spend a mere 370gigs of data, about 1.6gig a day over 237 days, that's is insanely low all things considered.

 

[furpile]

Yeah, currently I only have Witcher 3 and GTA V installed, and GTA is already over 90GB. Will have to get another SSD at some point, my M2 250GB won't cut it if games get that big. Luckily I got fibre in my area last year so having to download a game is not a big deal anymore. Hope you get it soon.

 

[wizardofid]

Yeah, currently I only have Witcher 3 and GTA V installed, and GTA is already over 90GB. Will have to get another SSD at some point, my M2 250GB won't cut it if games get that big. Luckily I got fibre in my area last year so having to download a game is not a big deal anymore. Hope you get it soon.

Yeah not going to happen in my life time or any for that matter.