When it comes to digital storage, unused space is wasted space. If you still have some available storage after setting up your essential software and documents, there are some helpful tools and processes that benefit from lots of unused drive capacity.
It’s worth noting that modern operating systems will automatically use empty storage for cached browser data, system and app backups, and other temporary data. You shouldn’t fill up your computer’sentirestorage capacity, or it could run out of room for critical tasks like downloading OS updates. If you have a Windows PC or Mac, try to keep at least 20 GB available at all times.
1Offline Wikipedia, Dictionary, and More
Kiwixis a free application that allows you to browse and search Wikipedia without an internet connection, using library files downloaded ahead of time and saved on your device. The top hundred English Wikipedia articles with images is only a 331 MB download. You can save the entire English Wikipedia in text-only format for 57 GB, and the version with images is 110 GB.
You’re not limited to just Wikipedia, though. Theofficial Kiwix libraryincludes downloadable packages for Stack Overflow, ArchWiki, Project Gutenberg eBooks, Wikiquote, Wikitionary, and other resources. I have Wikipedia’s text-only version and Wikitionary saved on my laptop, just in case I ever have an extended internet outage or take a plane trip.
My only issue with Kiwix is that downloads can be slow with the built-in library manager. I ended up downloading the .ZIM files from the Kiwix library website with my torrent client, moving them to a specific folder I made, and then using the files through the Open menu in Kiwix. This also made it easy to exclude the libraries frommy Time Machine backups.
2Spotify Downloads
If you have theSpotify desktop applicationinstalled, you may download playlists or albums to your computer. That means no more buffering for your favorite playlists, and they’ll continue working even when you lose an internet connection.
Before you start downloading, I recommend changing your audio quality for downloads to ‘Very high’ to get the best experience. Click your profile picture at the top-right corner of the Spotify window, select the Settings menu option, and look for the Download dropdown menu in the ‘Audio quality’ section.
You can save a playlist or album by opening its page and clicking the Download button (it’s the down arrow icon), or by right-clicking the item and selecting the Download option. When you need to recover some storage space, the same menu option and button will remove the downloads.
Spotify
Spotify is a pioneer in music streaming. It features a vast library, impressive bitrate, curated and custom playlists, as well as offline streaming. Spotify is available for free and for a monthly or annual fee.
3Large Language Models
You’ve probably used generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini, which all rely on cloud services. However, you can get similar functionality from running a large language model (LLM) on your own hardware, using applications likeLM Studio. That includes models like Meta’s Llama, Google Gemma (the foundation of Gemini), distilled versions of the DeepSeek model, Microsoft’s Phi models, and many others.
You need a decent GPU or NPU to run these models locally on your computer, and they work best when the entire model can be loaded into RAM. For example, the basicGemma 3 1B modelis only around 700MB, but more capable models likedistilled DeepSeek on Qwen3are over 4GB. Some models are purpose-built for specific tasks, so experimenting with multiple models could take up a lot of storage space on your PC.
I don’t often use AI chatbots, since they can have issues with accuracy, but I do haveGemma 3 4Bdownloaded in LM Studio for image transcription (like turning images of tables into Markdown format) and occasional coding assistance. Best of all, the local AI models don’t need an internet connection like cloud-based chatbots.
4Local Music Library
Before the days of Spotify, Pandora, and YouTube Music, the digital music experience was ripping music CDs with a computer, playing your songs with software like iTunes or Winamp, and copying them to a music player. Thankfully, you can still do that if you want, and it’s a much better experience now than it was in 2003.
If you buy digital music through stores like Amazon, Bandcamp, GOG, or Steam, you can save them in a central music folder for easy playback and management. Thenew Windows Media Player is a great place to startif you’re on Windows 10 or 11—just select your music folder and it will organize everything for you. Media Player and other applications can also copy music from CDs to your digital library, but your PC needs an internal or external disc drive. If you already have a Plex server, you canset up a music libraryfor easy streaming to all your devices.
I’ve had my own digital music library for years, mostly with music missing from Spotify and other mainstreaming streaming services, like video game soundtracks. Right now it’s all in the Apple Music app on my Mac, which I can synchronize to my iPhone 15 over a USB connection. I might move back to Plex and Plexamp at some point, but this setup is working for now.
The best part about managing your own digital music library in the modern era is that storage capacity is less of a concern. No more converting music to low bitrates so they fit on a Zip disk or iPod Nano—I’m ripping all my CDs as 320kbps MP3. You can even go for a FLAC/lossless library if you want, but high-bitrate lossy audio is my ideal balance between storage and music quality.
One word of warning: if you start building up a music library, make sure it’s backed up to cloud storage or somewhere else. Even if you still have access to all the downloads and ripped CDs, rebuilding a larger music library from scratch is a tedious process.
5iPhone Backups
If you have an iPhone or iPad, you cancreate a local backupof the operating system, settings, photos, video recordings, and some other data. That way, if you need to do a factory reset or switch to a new device, you can restore your backup instead of relying completely on iCloud.
If you have a Mac, you can create a backup with the Finder or (on older macOS versions) iTunes. On a Windows PC, you can do a backup with theApple Devices appor iTunes.
Local backups don’t include Apple Mail data, data already store in your iCloud, Apple Pay information, and other sensitive data. Still, it’s a lot better than nothing at all. The storage size on your computer will depend on how much data is on the device—the latest backup of my 128GB iPhone 15 after two years of usage is about 35GB.
iPhone 16e
The iPhone16e is an affordable addition to the iPhone 16 line, costing $200 less than the base iPhone 16.
There are many other great applications and workflows that benefit from lots of unused storage, but these are just five options that I wanted to highlight. Feel free to fill up the rest of your storage with Steam games,legalbackups of your movies, and anything else.
