I enjoyed reading this post by Marginalia "Your harddrive is probably full"

You can construct an entropic argument that there are simply more ways for a harddrive to be full than ways in which it can be empty.

Of course it made me check how full my laptop drive is, and indeed it was more than 75% full, as predicted.

But, I almost never feel that my hard drive is full. I can very easily free up almost any amount of disk space at any time, without any thought. While writing this blog post, I ran a single command and now my harddrive is 50% empty.

The other part of the equation is that a full disk isn’t a problem until it’s so full you can’t put more stuff on it, and at the point it’s so irredeemably cluttered that when you do clean it up, you only have the patience to clean up enough to bide your time, judging the fate of every file on the harddrive is simply too much work.

Why doesn't this apply to me? Because I have put in the up-front thought to organize things, so that I never have to do that anymore.

I have 3 categories of files that I can remove at any time I need more space, without any thought:

  1. Any files that are stored in git-annex. This is one of git-annex's superpowers; you can git-annex drop any file and stop it using disk space, but the file is still there (as a broken symlink) so you don't risk losing or forgetting about it.
  2. Caches.
  3. Files in ~/tmp/, which is reserved for any files I only want to have a passing acquaintance with. If I'm not comfortable with something being deleted at any time, I don't put it there.

Not only do I only have these 3 categories, these are the only 3 categories for everything except OS files and files I have decided I never want to remove (eg dotfiles and other files stored in git repos).

Computer scientists invented caches (and of course cache invalidation is no problem lol) so I only needed to learn about that one. Unix gave me /tmp/ as an example that I long ago used as the basis for the rules for my ~/tmp/. I hope that git-annex might also serve as an example that moving files between drives is not the best way to manage disk space use.