Andrew Lee wrote: ↑Tue Oct 11, 2022 8:05 pm
It's not larges files, it's lot of small files.
For example, I keep all the photos/videos taken over the past 20y on my HDD. The total size is only about 200GB, but there are >100k files in there (sorted into subfolders I may add).
I keep incremental backups on some other HDDs. Sometimes when I have to delete the entire folder of >100k files on the backup drives, the Explorer method will take a very long time!
I hear ya.
I wasn't really focused on file sizes - large versus small, rather, IMO it would seem one of the quickest ways to get to 10TB (or much more) of data was by managing a large database of video files in HD or UHD, etc. True though, for a professional photographer who keeps a database of their work, and knowing how large a tiff, raw, or psd file can be, managing a database of images could get one to 10TB (or much more) of data very quickly as well.
Again, for my purposes here, size doesn't matter