So I’ve been consolidating all of my storage and removing all the duplicates and junk files.
In actual physical storage, this was spread across 12TB worth of hard drives, all partially full.
After everything was said and done, I’m using 1.3TB of space if you don’t include games. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is stuff dating back to 2015. Sometimes it’s actually worth it to just clean up your junk files.
I’ve always been one for moderation. Plus, the big issue was just being able to find all of it. Everything was so scattered and in some cases I had half my Steam library downloaded onto two or three of the hard drives, all outdated.
Now I know where it all is and can easily back it up, where before I only had one copy of a lot of my most important files.
This is actually what lead me to set up a software RAID - my family is primarily Windows and I didn’t want to remember if the files were on D:, F:, G:, K:, etc. I’d rather have a root folder that’s extendable.
I’m a big advocate of unraid servers. Mix And match any size of drives you have available into a single large NAS with protection against drive failures. You can use old pc hardware you might have lying around. It’s commercial software but you can demo it for free. It’s good enough that I own two full pro licenses.