How much storage space is too much?

#1

At work last night me and another coworker were discussing how much storage space we had on our phones. Both of us have the Galaxy s9+ which comes with 64gb standard…now he says he is almost maxed out but refuses to get a sd card. Where I have my internal near maxed with movies and I have a 128Gb sd card with around 100Gb of music and pictures.

This got me thinking, on my computer I have close to 14TB of hard drive space and he asked me how much of that is actually used. I checked and realized I’m only using close to 5TB of space, so do I really need to have all that much storage space? Do any of us ever really need as much space as we can get?
With cell phones does having a sd card make a difference to you or would Internal memory suite you just fine?

I realize in this day and age with everything digital and peoples need to constantly take pictures, we may be push in by the limits of wha th storage use to be justifiable. But, what if we end up with so much storage that it becomes redundant and pointless.

I use to thing the more the better and having multiple copies of everything was good, but now I’m not so sure. What’s everyone’s thoughts and opinions on this?

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Data backup habits
#2

only and 5TB do not make since in the same sentence :laughing:

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#3

The more storage you have the more you use. :sunglasses:
The less you have the less you really need! :grin:

“circulus vitiosus”

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#4

Well, yea…but when I have 14Tb of space and just 5Tb is being used it’s just wasted not being used

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#5

Depends on your normal usage patterns and content, if your a video, photo and music buff always go higher…

I’m currently rocking most mobile devices at between 64-256GB in size but my home NAS currently has a 9TB RAID with around 3TB to spare at present (so maybe 12 months)…but with additional HDD upgrades I can get it to 36TB…

iPad - 64GB with around 9GB spare (movies and apps)
iPhone - 128GB with around 20-30GB free (music and apps)
NAS - 9TB with 3TB free (HD video and lossless music albums, some software and archive stuff)

How much space is too much? Having petabyte’s when your only storing x10 CD’s, x5 word documents and a few family photos for posterity :grin:

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#6

If I added all the hard drives I have and backups of other hard drives o probably would be close to 2 petabytes. But I learned to never have them all going at the same time as hard drive failures suck the life out of you. I guess maybe that’s why I have so much space and limit how much I use at any given time due to fear of drive failure.

#7

I think many of the things we are storing, we need only once.
Same was in my younger days when we made video recordings from TV.
Result:
We had a pile of these cartrides, BUT we never watched the films.

And I will tell you a secret:
All my really important files can be stored at a 2GB stick!!! :heart_eyes:

#8

I write stories and poems, about 12 of my poems have been published. I have numerous copies of my writings because I did lose them all at one point. My family knows if something ever happened to me I want to have a book made of my work. Also, if anyone ever tried to claim my work as their own I uave time stamp proof of my work and when it was written. As for most everything else, pictures and videos from my family that’s been handed down are all digitalized and stored to which we have looked at and seen multiple times.

#9

I have an S8, with 64gb and a 16gb card.

Ariund half of the card is taken up with old music, and I have 38 GB free on phone … The rest is apps, and pre-installed crap n OS.

Pre-iphone 3gs, we were all happy with a 250gb lappy n 3/4 GB on handset (if lucky).

I think, as has been said,… The more you have, the more you want.

Being brutally honest… How much space is taken up with crap (cos you can) and media you no longer want/watch/listen to?

In old days, I saved it all, cos was difficult to replace (now it’s drag n drop via lappy, or just do direct via torrent etc).

Plus, all my photos (taken on phone n previous handsets) are online in a couple places, plus what I have on the phone… Prob a good ⅓ is crap and one time used screenshots.

Google photos gives you unlimited storage of photos n cideos., So only need temp on handset… Half the time, it’s being bothered to remove n tidy.up, or fear if you did, it’ll vanish from the cloud.mind, I have a few cloud accounts via various accounts (Samsung, Dropbox, Google photos to name a couple). So tho, do have older pics nowhere else.

I think we could all use n need less, but cos it’s free (unless you pay extra for handset with extra space) we use it.

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#10

I’m using about half the space of my 64GB iPhone. Prior to Apple Music, I would need to get at least the 128GB version as my music collection is close to 100GB. But even though I had all my music with me, I found myself streaming music most of the time through radio apps like Pandora as I wanted to discover new music. So now I use Apple Music and only download the playlists I would want to listen to on an airplane (or other offline situation).

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#11

Personally I believe as much as you want is sufficient provided you have what you believe you need. If you only maintain enough storage for you what you need currently, then you always seem to hit a point where you run out. having high amounts of space is also nice because you can partition it out for easier access and storage. Honestly speaking, its always too much space until you don’t have any space available, the trick is to never be at a point where you need more.

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#12

My personal/work laptop has a 1tb SSD and my NAS at home has 15tb in raid 0 with most of it free. Eventually it will fill up with movies, music, and pictures, but as of right now its less than half full. My gaming computer has 1tb in SSDs and it fluctuates depending on which games I am playing.

I say all of that to say that looking at all that storage I don’t consider any of it a waste of space, and will probably expand the storage of the NAS and the gaming computer in the next year or so as files get bigger, games get bigger, etc.

That being said, my phone has 64g and is only half full because I use plex and OneDrive to access my files/media through the cloud and so only apps, pictures and videos take up storage on my phone.

#13

I have an LG G4 32 gig with a 128gb SD bard. I can get buy with this setup but my plan is to go with a 64gb or higher phone if its Android. If I go with iPhone, I will get the biggest storage option available.

Currently my music (spotify downloaded songs and about 30 gigs but originally it was over a 100 gigs until my phone crashed and required a hard reset back to factory spec), pics, vids, and apps that can be installed to the SD are stored there.

I reserve the internal storage for apps.

As to my home system. I have a media center for my iTunes video/audio library, Plex/Kodi Server to store my movie and tv show collection. Its 8TB and almost full. I have image storage and that’s about 3 TB and almost full. Plus have another 10TB for backups and idle drives waiting to be used.

All to together I may have around 6 to 8 TB free.

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#14

As time progress Digital media quality improves and larger file are created eg 4k 8k and higher pixel photos. I personally like to save my favorite movies TV shows and pictures and would happy to have large storage drives. I think with this shifting goal line it is better to have large and redundant backup drives.

I personally have 256+64 so 320gb of storage on my phone and do no feel like that is excessive. I record a lot of 4K videos and use my phone as a portable media hub with lots of movies for travel.

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#15

OMFG, when you consider …**The movie Avatar needed about 1 PB of storage to render all those graphics **, that’s a shit load of data

#16

They still make those 2GB USB sticks? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

#17

On mobile devices, >32Gb is too much. My phone has 32Gb of storage and it’s a bit of a hassle to connect it to my computer and browse my files on it; gotta wait for thumbnails to load up.

#18

Get a faster computer :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: when I hook my phone up it loads almost instantly

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#19

I have a 2012 MacBook Air with 128GB SSD, and today I regret not having a little more. I do own a couple of external storage units amounting to 5TB total, but whenever I need to work on something on the computer before sending it to an external storage I realize the next time I buy a computer I’ll aim higher. I have redundant data saved because one can never be too safe.

My iPhone and iPad both have 64GB and so far I’m doing OK on them. I rely on cloud storage a lot for those, and I offload data constantly to have at least 25% free storage at all times. That said, if I were to really set myself free, this would max up quickly. Mind you, I don’t download videos on my phone, and I only download from Netflix on my iPad when I’ll travel, and the same for music on my phone. For most of my day-to-day needs, the 64GB on them seems to be enough.

Most of my data is photos, specially on my external drives. I take a lot of photos, both on my phone and my DSLR camera, and I always configure to maximum quality since it’s easy to reduce size and quality if I need to, but impossible to increase. I have a lot of different capacity SD and Mini-SD cards, and I swap them constantly, trying to get all of them used in more of less the same amount. None of those cards are “super-high capacity” - 128GB and over - because I have had and heard my share of card failures, so I rather have lots of smaller cards than a few big ones. Again, one can never be too safe.

At least the price per GB is fairly low these days. I remember the days of the Intel 286 systems when a 80MB HDD would set you back a few hundred dollars…

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#20

My next laptop will have USB 3.0/Thunderbolt :slight_smile:

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