It was the early noughties and a TB was expensive. I wrote a spreadsheet with inputs from the Novell .ocx jobbies. The files were stored on some Novell NSS volu.mes.
I was able to show all states of the files and aggregate stats too.
Nowadays a disc is massive and worrying about compression is daft
I wish. Not even because I want to store more data, but because that would imply going the other way is super cheap. Make RAID-1 the standard, with a filesystem that keeps snapshots for multiple months. But we're not at the point where that costs a trivial amount.
It depends on your data.
For (generalised) text files or even Word documents, we have been at that point for quite a while.
So we are already living in that world.
And more importantly, once you have local RAID you can put all your important files on it. That's a critical part of the world I want to see.
Yes, I was merely using these examples to show that storage space is cheap enough. Google and Microsoft store your stuff on HDD and SSD and tape, too. They ain't magic.
Even for text files, the only software I trust to find them all when set up by a normal person is something like backblaze and that's a good chunk of money. And for the rest of the data you need to pay significantly for the space no matter how you do it.
Eg installed Steam games take up oodles of space, but you don't need to back them up.