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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/miked999b on 2024-11-06 13:18:01+00:00.

Like most of us here, I just accumulate stuff because downloading and curating is fun and very addictive.

I have four internal drives and seven externals. About 100TB in total. It got to the point where every single drive was almost full. File explorer in Windows a sea of red. I’d juggled stuff about from one drive to another as much as I possibly could, but there was nowhere left to go. I needed another drive.

Somehow I just couldn’t stomach the thought of buying yet another drive. Wasting hundreds of pounds just to add more stuff I don’t even use.

I have all these TV shows that I’ve never watched and almost certainly never will, but it’s nice to have the choice, right? I’ve also often thought why do I have all nine seasons of this extremely common and easy to obtain show that I’ve never watched a minute of? Same with films. I’ve got 1,300 of them. I don’t watch films, at all. I’ve watched one film in 2024. But hey, I might one day.

I always thought it would make sense to just keep season 1 of shows and delete the rest, and download them if/when I need them. I have fast internet, usenet, public trackers, private trackers, real debrid. It’s so easy to get stuff. But I could never bring myself to do it. I just couldn’t. You know how it is.

But one show was taking up 0.7TB on it’s own and I’ve never watched it. I had to do something, so I deleted season 2 onwards. And seeing the difference it made triggered something inside me. I’d broken through the mental barrier and then I couldn’t stop. Spent a whole afternoon deleting seasons 2 onwards of almost every easily obtainable show I had. It felt amazing seeing the free space numbers go up and up.

When I was done I had roughly 17TB of free space. File explorer now a sea of blue. One of my drives had almost 6TB free, wtf? It felt amazing, like I’d freed myself from something. Two weeks on I don’t regret it one bit and I haven’t missed any of the stuff I deleted in any way.

Not sure if this is an advice post or a confessional at this point 😂 This post will probably go down like a lead balloon in here, but seriously - deleting stuff felt so incredibly freeing and now I have tons of space for things that are actually useful and that I might actually want and use!