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.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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too true o the download a current version. and every so often I do clean them all up except the old BSD and BeOS type ones
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 😅
Only 100? That's like 20 ISOs.
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.
I don't really hoard them. I keep a collection of ISOs on a 16 GB Ventoy drive, but that's not a lot.
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.
I currently have around 30 .iso images averaging ~2GB so not that much. Split between Linux/BSD/Haiku & BeOS
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.
My husband’s response: all of them
You mean my emergency disk space?
Nice try FBI.
I thought that was a euphemism for porn.
I'm not that into Linux yet
Yes.
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 just checked. In me archive directory in OperatingSystems I've got a total of 40 files. However, now I remember I should delete so many of them as they are outdated or not needed anymore. Also not all of them are Linux ISOs. ~10 of them are BSDs.
26 after deletion.
6 BSD 1 Android x86 1 visopsys
Currently have 12 ISOs, 25 GB worth. Same reason, trying them out in a VM and just keep them around.
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%
I only keep one example of stuff that works for specific devices. Ubuntu 14.04+mac for early Macintels, Linux Mint Debian 32-bit for systems that can't do 64, evrrything else, latest Mint Debian or Fedora KDE.
I got burned one time where a specific program I was using, broke on the latest release but I didn't actually test that program till months after the release. I had to just wait until it got fixed, which took another few months. Though tbh if I had saved a copy of the previous release I don't know if I would have gone through the trouble of reverting
About a dozen.
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.
I only happen to save ISOs if I find them on old drives during cleanup. Despite this, I do have 49 Linux ISOs and one FreeNAS ISO too. I don't have a reason to delete them; I am not short of space.
I keep about 55GB of system ISOs on my server, as an archive. 28GB out of that are w*nodes ISOs. Most of these are the ISOs I regularly use or are hard to find (like win11 old enough to make a local account, Orange Pi Zero 3 proprietary Linux image, etc)
I also seed a few of armbian and proxmox images, so that would be another 50GB.
And I have a 128GB Ventoy USB thumbdrive which is almost half full with ISOs, most of which are Linux
I'll be staying with win10 ltsc on VMs for as long as I can manage, but most are on a flavour of Linux
I think all the Windows LTSC editions still allow local accounts, that might have changed though
I have around 100GB of various Linux and BSD ISOs from over the years that I haven't cleaned out yet. Most of the ones I use today I just download as I need it and delete it after. Unless it's for my VMs, I'll keep those around so I can quickly get a new one built.
For me it's more how many glash drives. And I'd rather not talk about it
A handful of ones, mostly just what I run on my home systems, but I also have a Windows 10 and 11 iso for archival purposes, and just in case I have to run a Windows VM for some obscure reason in the future.
I only keep a few system rescue ISOs plus one or two current installation ones on a thumb drive. Hoarding ISOs serves no purpose. Although I usually have a few lurking around that I forgot to delete from VM tests or the such.
The only reason to do this would be to seed them. But my puny upload bandwidth makes that infeasible.
300GB is enough for me to upload a TB per day