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.

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.

Wait, are we talking Linux ISOs or “Linux ISOs”?

Only the ones I use on a USB stick with Ventoy.

Nice try FBI.

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.

You mean my emergency disk space?

Yes.

I thought that was a euphemism for porn.

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 However, now I remember I should delete so many of them as they are outdated or not needed anymore.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

About a dozen.

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!

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

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

Currently have 12 ISOs, 25 GB worth. Same reason, trying them out in a VM and just keep them around.

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.

300GB is enough for me to upload a TB per day

The only reason to do this would be to seed them. But my puny upload bandwidth makes that infeasible.

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.

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 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

I have a couple. My convern is getting all the packages on top of something happends. Like htop and such.