I remember rejoicing over my very first floppy disk drive, which used 5.25" disks. A disk had the capacity to store all of 170 KILObytes of data. This came well after my first modem, which operated at 300 baud. All of that high-end technology was hooked up to a computer that had every bit of 3,583 bytes of RAM, when booted up.
It's funny, because I learned good computer storage housekeeping, back in those days. And today, even with 1 TB hard drives, I am still extremely careful about not storing multiples of a file, or several revisions of a file. This machine, which is my daily user, has a tiny, 230 GB hard drive. I have alloted 132 GB of storage space for all of my personal files, but I am only using 7.79 GB of that amount. If I have a large directory that I want to keep, but won't need to access regularly, I zip it up for storage.
I have a copy of every version of XenForo that has been released, since November 2011, when we started using it. I have a copy of every version of WordPress that has been released since August 2007, when I first started using it. Along with copies of ever version of every add-on and modification I've ever used for those systems. I have copies of Drupal releases, Joomla releases, vBulletin releases, SMF releases, MyBB releases, phpBB releases, etc. Along with the usual photographs, documents and music that we all store on our computers. And I am still only using <8 GB of disk to keep all of it.
I've worked on computers for people and they will have thousands of stored e-mails on their machines. Of course, these are always the pack rats who complain about how slowly their computer runs.