We’ve all heard the “my 100TB NAS is full of Linux ISOs” joke but how many of you actually hoard ISOs? I just noticed I have ~100GB, so not that many though definitely way more than I need (I just like to try new distros on my VMs and I never delete them after).
Isos all go on a flash drive. When I need one it’s faster to download a current version than it would be to update the old version after installing.
sometimes a program I use doesn’t work on the latest version and I have to revert. Sometimes I realize this so late the older version isn’t available online anymore. Has this happened often enough to warrant 100 GB of ISOs? Definitely not 😅
I don’t really hoard them. I keep a collection of ISOs on a 16 GB Ventoy drive, but that’s not a lot.
I delete older ones as soon I downloaded a new one. I guess, my isos take well below ~15 GB of space. It is only Debian, Fedora and Gentoo afterall.
tbh I should just delete the old ISOs I have as well, they’re practically useless since the package repos don’t even support them anymore
I keep them around just in case I run into something that requires an old kernel.
Wait, are we talking Linux ISOs or “Linux ISOs”?
Only the ones I use on a USB stick with Ventoy.
Pretty much the same, until the middle fell out of my keychain usb drive
Same, Ventoy is so fucking good. My answer is two, I guess. All my computers are either running Mint or CachyOS.
My husband’s response: all of them
Most of the things I horde that’s legitimate are firmware for hardware. All too often I need the firmware and the hardware company had been bought and the new company shuts down the firmware.
Also a few images for soft targets so I can test metasploit ect.
Nice try FBI.
Yes.
You mean my emergency disk space?
I thought that was a euphemism for porn.
I’m not that into Linux yet
Currently, just 6, Proxmox, Nixos, and 2 each, Ubuntu Server and Kubuntu.
When we moved last year we went on a massive cleaning purge throwing away anything we didn’t need or want and I included digital files in that. I went from 68TB used down to about 20TB.
From memory, I had just about every Ubuntu server release since 2008 in both x86-64,and ARM roughly a dozen releases of Kubuntu, a couple copies of Knoppix, Gentoo, Silverblue, RHEL, Fedora, plus about 20 other random isos from when I was distro hopping, before I settled on Ubuntu and NixOS.
I think the isos added up to 15 or 20TB of what I deleted, the rest was just random junk I thought I might need, but based on access dates, never did.
The oldest iso I deleted (based on timestamps) was a copy of Windows 98, circa 2004
That’s a crazy amount of clean-up, impressive. I find it’s hard to delete even just 10% of my collection, and you did like 70%
Currently have 12 ISOs, 25 GB worth. Same reason, trying them out in a VM and just keep them around.
I have a small 32GB VenToy drive filled with a bunch of distros that I keep updated to a somewhat regular degree (Fedora Workstation and KDE, Mint, EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Bazzite Deck, and Pop! OS for a mix of different DEs)
I keep it around in case anybody is interested in installing Linux, it makes it effortless (no need to go download the ISO file from the website and flash it, removing a barrier of entry). I have used it exactly once, and I’m hoping I can use it again for somebody else!
I have a couple. My convern is getting all the packages on top of something happends. Like htop and such.
Yeah, keeping the needed packages around would ballon storage size if you want to do it for an entire directory of distro isos, especially if you’re interested in historic releases (e.g. for hardware compatibility). I’ve actually been experimenting with using locally saved packages lately, mostly because HDD+ethernet is about 20 times faster than downloading packages off the internet for me. It’s fine as a cache if you’re managing several instances of the same distro, but if you want to full-on install several different distros/releases off HDD you’ll need to seriously invest in storage space. Might be worth it though … hmmmmm.