Your harddrive is probably full

Summary

I currently have 17 GB free space on my root drive, out of 0.47 TB usable space, that’s 3% free space.I also have an additional harddrive installed, 12 TB, it has 140 GB free, which may seem a lot but it’s actually only about 1%.Your harddrive is probably pretty full too. Maybe not as crammed, but odds are it’s probably closer to full than empty. I ran a poll on mastodon and approximately half of the respondents, counting 81 people in total, had a harddrive that was more than 75% full.Pretty much every time in my life I can think of, my storage has been pretty full, to the point where I’d have to regularly find and clean up files.I’ve doubled the amount of storage space I have many times, starting at I think 80 MB in the ’90s. Now I have tens of terabytes. They are still mostly occupied.Software exists for the task of identifying which files to delete when cleaning up your harddrive, and such software has existed for a long time. It may be an obvious statement, but this is a problem that people have and have had.Harddrives tend to be pretty full, regardless of how big they are, getting more storage even by several orders of magnitude doesn’t seem to fix this.Why is this?You can construct an entropic argument that there are simply more ways for a harddrive to be full than ways in which it can be empty. Then if we assume we mostly make random changes of state without thinking about storage, we should tend toward a full harddrive.I don’t think this is wrong, but at the same it’s an incomplete explanation.The other part of the equation is that a full disk isn’t a problem until it’s so full you can’t put more stuff on it, and at the point it’s so irredeemably cluttered that when you do clean it up, you only have the patience to clean up enough to bide your time, judging the fate of every file on the harddrive is simply too much work.This is something pretty universal, and at the root of many paradoxes of technology, society, and life.In software:We don’t optimize softwar...