when a wildfire took down my internet last month I sure didn't regret hoarding. I had plenty of unseen entertainment at my disposal, watched a bunch of new shows. when it did come back I decided not only to keep hoarding anything interesting to me, but to invest in a new backup drive to keep the hoard safe lol.

What I do is sort the directories and files by size and go largest to smallest. Based on the likely distribution of files sizes, 20% of your files and/or directories will account for 80% of the hard drive space. I usually then choose candidates for deletion and evaluate them, deleting them on the spot or skipping them for this time. I do this until I get the space reduction I want or until I'm sure that I want to keep what is in the largest 20%. After I reach one of the two states: top 20% of files/directories are keepers or I deleted down X GB. This method can be done with any sorting method. For example, by play count or by date added, old to new. Keep going until the top 20% are keepers. The same distribution is likely to apply across all vertical data labels so the filter is generically usable in lots of situations. For example, 20% of car drivers likely get 80% of speeding tickets. We could reduce speeding by 80% by speed limiting these drivers' cars or by revoking their drivers licenses. Another example is memory hogs in a computer system. The top 20% of memory hogging programs likely account for 80% of used memory in a system. This distribution is called the Pareto principle. The principle is an example of a power law.

Aside from using the word 'consume'...

I don't like hoarding. I become so isolated from choice that I can't enjoy anything I've ever acquired. I've always gotten what I wanted because I wanted it, not because everyone else has gotten it and not because it's just to take up data on my drives. What I have now currently anyways, will sustain me for days to months and getting more of it will not make it better. It'll just bring oversaturation and I'll be too isolated again to bother.

Often I download just to seed but only when I know the uploaders

I keep the stuff I download and seed it until I run out of room, I have a TB hdd for movies and such; and since I download like huge files, I usually delete stuff if I don't care about it a lot

I try to only grab the stuff someone in the house wants to watch.

If my drives ever fill up, I’ll either expand or delete things I know we’ll never watch again.

I mostly only load TV shows and movies. At least those are by large the biggest part in terms of storage taken. Well.. I only load stuff that I actually want to watch. I also load some stuff for friends, but it has to be decent quality and be not totally niche (aka I'm eventually watching it, or other friends)

I'm mostly hoarding this stuff because I have no fucking clue.

what is the problem?

Use a 256 GB ssd Good luck hoarding on that rice grain

I only download what I plan to consume shortly, then delete.

I just watch and delete because I don't ever really watch anything more than a few times anyways.

The only kind of stuff I've ever made backups of is dev software and old keygens because . well - that kind of stuff disappears too easily with the new&shiny fad.

All the few shows/movies on my hard drive I end up watching when I get around to it and feel like watching. Though, recently, there have been 3 specific cartoons I've been watching a lot more of due to not feeling like watching other shows.

So far, the only things I have got that were bad quality and unwatchable were 2 cartoons. One you could easily tell it was upscaled and just looked a bit off, making it feel uncomfortable for me to watch and enjoy. The other, first episode in and they cut the theme song and had the channel watermark, for a show that's a few decades, so I didn't bother checking the other episodes and just deleted it. With the first show, I looked immediately because there was a specific episode I needed to check, but the other, it took me over a half a year to finally check to see how good quality it is/was.

Do you need the space? If not who cares.

Personally I run a media service for friends and family. I'm about to bring another 100tb online because we are running low on storage. Am I holding or just running a rack of servers in my basement?