Comments on: Making Room On Your Hard Drive

By: Mark Shead

Mark Shead — Tue, 24 May 2011 13:55:11 +0000

Interesting. I like how it lets you see the file size visually.

By: Dodge

Dodge — Tue, 24 May 2011 06:32:26 +0000

Hi Mark, thanks for the suggestions. It’s really hard to clean out your hard drive.

I use GrandPerspective for the Mac. It shows you visually which parts of your hard drive consume huge amounts of space.

By: nony

nony — Wed, 18 May 2011 21:26:10 +0000

try windirstat.exe for windows. visual representation, very easy to spot large files etc. click on and identify what is what. ability to move, delete, inspect everything. my favorite to see what’s on my HDD

By: J. B. Rainsberger

J. B. Rainsberger — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:43:34 +0000

On UNIX, like Mac OS X, you can find large files this way:

$ du -d 1 -h | grep ^…G

This will find any immediate subdirectory that is GB in size. Drill down and repeat the command until you find a directory you can trim. You can “grep ^…M” to find subdirectories only MB in size. “grep ^\d\d\dM” will find subdirectories hundreds of MB in size.

If you do this frequently, considering aliasing the command

[in ~/.proflle]
alias find_big_folders=”du -d 1 -h | grep ^…G

$ find_big_folders
…

Works great.

By: Mark Shead

Mark Shead — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 12:36:15 +0000

Thanks everyone for all the suggestions. I’ll checkout some of these other options that I haven’t heard of before.

The ability to delete without leaving the tools seems make things a lot easier. OmniDiskSweeper only does this in the registered version.

Most of these tools take awhile to run. Has anyone found one that is nearly instant? I don’t know if that is even possible because the filesystem may not keep the data stored in the directory pointers, so it might have to be recalculated by reading the size on every single file.

OmniDiskSweeper takes about 10 minutes to index my 80 Gb hard drive.

By: Ben D. Manevitz

Ben D. Manevitz — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 13:46:26 +0000

I’ve used SpaceMonger, and have found it very useful. The free version is 1.4, available here: http://www.werkema.com/software/spacemonger.html, there’s a link to the newer version (2.x), which costs about $20.

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:08:18 +0000

When I was Windows-based, the previously mentioned Sequoia View was a disk maintenance must-have. On the Mac, I’ve found that the open source Disk Inventory X is also indispensable.

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 00:30:23 +0000

I don’t really have a big problem with disk space is it could sometimes be time consuming to find out that there’s not enough space after waiting for the copied file to finish. Thanks for sharing this.

By: Howie

Howie — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 00:11:37 +0000

It’s a good program. We usually don’t recognize the space until it’s full. We may have the idea to organize it but don’t have the time. With this add on, it’s easy to allocate files.

By: Doc

Doc — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 03:02:40 +0000

I have found another solution.
ViewFolderSize Pro
http://www.moveax.com/

You can see folder sizes directly in Windows Explorer as number or as bar (percent of current folder size).
Also you can setup folder size alerts. If folder size reaches maximum or minimum value then ViewFolderSize Pro will execute selected actions (notify you, launch cd/dvd burner etc).
And at last, it working faster than software above. ;)

By: Gautam Satpathy

Gautam Satpathy — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 06:58:04 +0000

Nice article. Thanks.

I would also like to point you at JDiskReport from jGoodies (http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/). the software was created by Karsten Lentzsch and is great. I have been using it for more than 2 years now and I love it. And it is Free!

It is written in Java and you will need a JRE to run it.

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 14:52:40 +0000

Great tip (like many before). I’ve been using TreeSize for quite some time myself and it is one of my most essential tools, e.g. for finding out where to look when your profile suddenly grows like hell.
In addition I would recommend Duplic8, which is a neat & cheap utility for tracing duplicate files, especially helpful when you are using (several) external hard-drives or various folders for projects – and have this tendency to not clean up immediately.
[ http://www.kewlit.com/duplic8 ]
Martin

By: Rolf F. Katzenberger

Rolf F. Katzenberger — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 10:49:53 +0000

For Windows, there is another excellent option named “Sequoia View”, available at
http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview/ (screenshots on display there, too).

Sequoia View scans your HDD and presents all files and directories in a very special view where you can immediately spot what takes up the most space, without having to drill down in a tree-like structure.

Under Linux/KDE, Konqueror supports a similar view labeled “File Size View”.