Probably the best thing that could happen to a computer user is to lose the hard disk, forcing a user to rebuild a system from scratch, as painful as this sounds. Hear me out on this. The ease with which a computer user can cram a hard disk full of useless files and programs is out of control. You can buy a 30GB hard disk now for a few hundred dollars. We'll all have 100GB soon.
Disk storage is like candy for a kid.
They can't say no. No candy for me. In the past we used to force ourselves to clean up the hard disk to make space for new files. We don't need to do that anymore, and in the past I have surmised that this is why we are in a mess. In fact, cleaning up the hard disk never worked and never will.