2143: Disk Usage

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Disk Usage

Title text: Menu -> Manage -> [Optimize space usage, Encrypt disk usage report, Convert photos to text-only, Delete temporary files, Delete permanent files, Delete all files currently in use, Optimize menu options, Download cloud, Optimize cloud , Upload unused space to cloud]

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a monstrosity of a powerpoint presentation. Added a table for the pie chart items, needs filling in. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Many personal computers provide a way to obtain a graphical breakdown of how their storage space is being used, most commonly by representing the filesystem as a pie chart in which each slice represents the proportion of the total storage space being taken up by a particular item.

In this comic, Randall has illustrated the usage of his hard disk drive in a similar manner, although as is common for him, the items in his hard drive start off seemingly normal and become increasingly strange:

Item	Explanation
Photos	Digital photographs are a common item to be stored on a hard disk; many people take lots of photographs with their smartphone and will commonly transfer them to a disk drive for safekeeping, editing, or organizing. With the high resolution of modern cameras and the ease of taking photos, it is common for photo collections to consume a significant amount of disk space.
Good photos	On the flipside, the ease of taking photographs means that it is very easy to take bad photographs, particularly as most people are not experienced at photography. The pie chart is rather bluntly indicating that of the many photographs Randall has taken, only a vanishingly small fraction of them are actually good.
Documents	On a file system, "Documents" is generally used as a catch-all term for the user's personal files.
Everything you've streamed since 2017
A single five-year old PowerPoint presentation	You don't need it anymore and it's taking a lot of space, but you remember how long it took you to create it and you can't bear to delete it.
"System"	This would be files related to the computer's Operating System. Typically one would leave these alone, since you don't really know what's critical to the computer's operation and what's not.
Unused	Parkinson's law, the computer storage corollary, says that data expands to fill the space available for storage. As such, this sliver representing the unused portion of the storage device will always be tiny.
"Cache"	The operating system and other programs often keep copies of data they've used or downloaded in case they need to use that data again; such data is usually stored in cache files. Often these can be deleted without too much ill effect, but some programs have different ways of deleting their own cache files.
"Other"	Files that cannot be definitively categorized generally end up in a category like this.
Why are there two full backups of my phone from 2015 deep in a settings folder?

"Photos" and "Documents" are both common things to see in a disk usage report. Randall has marked a distinction between "photos" and "good photos". The ratio between these two suggests that there is an alarming number of "bad" photos on the computer.

Almost a tenth of the storage is taken up by a single Powerpoint presentation made five years ago. While it may be ridiculously long or detailed, or both, to use so much storage, Powerpoint converts compressed graphics to full-resolution bitmaps as a historical cross-platform compatibility strategy (especially when conversion from PDF files is involved) so Powerpoint decks much larger than the sum of their component files are still very common.

Full backups of an old phone may have been stored to "settings" by a version of backup or file synchronization software which wanted to keep the resulting backup images in a location away from user control so they would be less likely to modify any of their component files, which might, for example, tend to clobber new versions with the modified old versions. Renaming a device under such circumstances might lead to duplicate backup images.

"Everything you've streamed since 2017" is likely referring to temporary media files that were stored on the disk while it was being "streamed" for viewing or listening from the Internet and never deleted when done. Streaming is a term that refers to accessing audio or video content on the Internet without downloading the entire media file first - it is instead played while it's being retrieved. An example of streaming is watching a YouTube video.

"System" is another common thing to see in the graph. This contains files the user is not using but the computer needs to run, such as the operating system. Randall has put quotation marks around the word to highlight how nebulous the term actually is and how he has no idea what the system files actually are.

One more possible explanation is that folder names like "Other", "Cache", "System" refer to storing porn while trying to hide this fact by using unsuspicious folder names. Hence the quotes.

Alarmingly, the "Unused" portion of the pie chart is extremely small, which means the disk is nearly full with very little remaining capacity. Users don't usually worry about what is using space on their computer disk until they get an alert about the disk running out of space - this is likely when a user would resort to viewing this type of graph to figure out what they can delete to free up disk space.

The title text references the management UI of a hypothetical disk cleaning utility. The following options are mentioned in its menu:

Optimize space usage

A common non-descript phrase often found in such tools.

Encrypt disk usage report

Often, one might want to encrypt data on the disk, not reports about said data. This may suggest that the unusual disk usage is embarrassing enough that the user may want to encrypt the usage report, preventing other people from reading it.

Convert photos to text-only

Plain-text documents take less space than pictures. Scanned documents can be automatically transcribed (OCR). However, applying such an algorithm to photos will result in garbage. Alternatively, it could be a tool to turn image files into text files by changing the extension to .txt. This would not save any space, and would only make the files more difficult to open.

Delete temporary files

Another real option. Temporary files are often not deleted automatically, so deleting them can save a significant amount of disk space.

Delete permanent files

A made-up term, that might refer to the user's documents, pictures, etc. You would not want to delete them.

Delete all files currently in use

Deleting files that are in use might result in data loss or program crashes.

Optimize menu options

Those options could really do with some optimization. (a reference to the first entry?)

Download cloud, Optimize cloud

Here, the cloud probably refers to cloud storage (online storage). Cloud storage would be too large by many orders of magnitude to fit, let alone download onto a desktop computer, but in 908: The Cloud, the cloud is depicted as (ultimately) running on a single desktop-sized server in Black Hat's house. Perhaps the "Optimize cloud" option would be used to enable such an arrangement.

Upload unused space to cloud

"Uploading empty space" is a) impossible and b) would result in less space being available, which is the opposite of what a disk cleaner utility is supposed to do.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[This comic shows a pie chart with 10 slices, each with a label and a line pointing to these ten different sized slices. There is a caption above the chart:]

Disk Space Usage Report

[The labels on each slice is given in clockwise order starting from the top middle. The percentages are estimated from the image and are noted in the square brackets before the transcript:]

[8%]: Why are there two full backups of my phone from 2015 deep in a settings folder?

[23%]: "Other"

[9%]: "Cache"

[2%]: Unused

[21%]: "System"

[9%]: A single five-year-old PowerPoint presentation

[6%]: Everything you've streamed since 2017

[3%]: Documents

[1%] Good Photos

[18%] Photos

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Discussion

Seems fine to me! 172.69.62.40 20:54, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Finally managed to contribute something again! It's 00:00 now, so I'll pick this up tomorrow if noone else has by then -- //gir.st/ (talk) 21:56, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't see what's alarming on ratio between good and bad photos. With digital cameras, actually choosing which photos are good takes more time than taking them in first place, so its often skipped. -- Hkmaly (talk) 22:47, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Why do I feel so seen?!? Explain THAT! 162.158.255.88 23:52, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

I think the menu option about "Download Cloud" in the title text is referring to the general concept of the cloud - in other words, downloading the "entire" cloud, not their own personal cloud storage! Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 00:36, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Why is there an IP editor bolding random letters? RandomIsocahedron (talk) 02:13, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Look at the bolded letters. It's the guy who plasters 'soon the truth will be revealed' everywhere again. 162.158.114.94 09:58, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

I totally missed the message contained in the bold letters! I guess the truth was not revealed to me! Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 12:55, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

I've replaced the table with a description list, as per the Editor FAQ. It's obvious that one is the "item" and the other its "explanation." -- //gir.st/ (talk) 17:04, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, I was just thinking I should probably do that :) Hawthorn (talk) 17:09, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

I think that "Optimize menu options" relates to the facility in older MS Office whereby it "hid" menu options that you hadn't used for "a while"; in theory "optimising" the menu and only showing you the options you used recently but in reality if you didn't use one of the programs for a long time you could open it and, so helpfully, find all your menu options gone. Not sure what to word in the explanation tho'. Nobby (talk) 07:15, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

FYI about the "Convert photos to text-only" part: Sometimes, when downloading pictures from internet the file is somehow saved as .txt and double click will successfully open as such (although it will look like gibberish as-is). If opened with a photo-viewing program that detects files with wrong extensions (IrfanView for example) the file can be renamed and opened as the photo file (.jpg usually) without loss of information. This can be used to hide photos not intended to be seen by other people.

"Convert photos to text-only" What about UUEncoding & UUDecoding? When newsgroups were much bigger, it was a popular way to transmit images. These Are Not The Comments You Are Looking For (talk) 04:36, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

that's an encoding, not a conversion. (this section, imo, already has way too many things. i'd trim it down to 1) ascii-art and 2) captionbot-like services) -- //gir.st/ (talk) 22:10, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

I mean he's got more free space than I do and I've got no videos, no documents, less than 5MB of photos, only about 1MB of which is actually on my computer's internal storage, and less than 2GB of applications, when you're using a laptop with 29.1GB max storage and no capability to format drives as internal for some reason or to increase said storage, you really start to hate system, and you wish that your internal storage could be replaced with that one SD you have that has more than 10 times the storage of your entire computer. 10:46, 26 June 2019 (UTC+12)

Randall has been known to use Mac computers (see comics referencing OS X "say" command, "Trash" folder, etc.) and the default MacOS disk storage display ( menu -> About This Mac -> Storage) is notorious for displaying huge wodges of used storage space with only the vague labels "System" or "Other", which can end up being infuriating when trying to clear out a hard drive. I'm pretty sure that's where this comic comes from. 172.68.66.63 11:10, 9 June 2022 (UTC)