Disk space by filetype

[Tony Abou-Assaleh]

I tried many strategies to free up some space on my numerous systems. In
particular, I tried

a) compression of infrequently used files
b) removing rarely used files
c) locate and eliminate duplicates
d) delete older versions of same files (e.g., backup versions)
e) increase drive capacity (purchase a drive)

In fact, I spent years doing a-d, and finally came to the conclusion that
e is the cheapest if your time has any value at all. Like Robert said, the
savings gained in method a to d are usually insignificant and are not
worth the effort. Drives are way cheaper that what they used to be (and
their life-expectancy is proportionally less) that you can just buy a
larger drive every once in a while (e.g., every year or 2 years, depending
on your needs).

Numerical example: 200GB internal HDD is about $100. 5 hours of data
management is likely to get you a few 100MB's on an 40GB drive (based on
own experience).

f) write files to DVDs.

DVDs are under $0.25/each these days, but again, with a short life
expectancy. Write your files to 2 DVDs, that's about $0.50 per ~4GB.
Cheaper than spending $100 if all you need is a few GBs.

In fact, DVDs are cheaper than HDDs per GB (even when you write data on 2
DVDs) but are less convenient. And since most of the data that takes a lot
of space typically doesn't change (movies, music, images, compressed
programs), you don't care in these cases that data on DVDs is static.

BTW, if you don't have a DVD writer, internal ones are under $50 these
days.

Cheers,

TAA

-----------------------------------------------------
Tony Abou-Assaleh
Lecturer, Computer Science Department
Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada, L2S 3A1
Office: MC J215
Tel:    +1(905)688-5550 ext. 5243
Fax:    +1(905)688-3255
Email:  taa-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org
WWW:    http://www.cosc.brocku.ca/~taa/
----------------------[THE END]----------------------

On Thu, 13 Apr 2006, Robert Brockway wrote:

> On Wed, 12 Apr 2006, Jason Spiro wrote:
>
> > I often seem to fill up my hard drive to the max.
> >
> > I have been wondering if it is practical to write a script to use UPX
> > to pack the binaries and shared libraries of seldom-used applications
>
> Binaries (and thus libraries) tend to compress poorly.  I'd say you have
> little to gain from doing this.
>
> I bought a 300GB drive in a combined firewire/usb2 enclosure for about
> $240 (incl tax) the day before yesterday.
>
> IMHO the solutions to this problem are:
>
> a) Increasing drive capacity
>
> b) Improved data management
>
> c) Both a and b.
>
> > (those whose last access time is long ago.) Or perhaps even strip
> > them, though that makes GDB backtraces upon crashes quite useless.
>
> Feel free to strip your binaries if they are not already.  No problem
> there if you don't want debugging output.  The savings still won't be
> huge.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Rob
>
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