![]() Watch my demonstration of Disk Inventory X! Sorry about IShowU's screen spam! Cruft We can then navigate up and down to locate other areas of wasted space, and DI highlights the current file or folder in the treemap to give a visual representation of what it contains. File types are listed on another inspector, ordered in descending order of size, allowing me to see that I had more than 100 GB of TV shows and movies on my drive, and these made up the bulk of my “missing” space!Ĭlick on a block, and DI displays the file as well as its location in the tree. One glance at the treemap and the eye is drawn to the large aqua file (my iPhoto library, all 25 GB of it) and the multitude of blue and red video files. GrandPerspective is a similar app, but I like DI better after trying both. I created this map with the awesome free Disk Inventory X application, which scans any drive connected to an OS X machine (even a NFS or CIFS share) and creates an interactive treemap. ![]() See the image at the top of the post for an example, using data from my laptop’s OS X drive. In this case, every file on a hard disk is represented according to its size and colorized by type. It divides up a rectangular region into color-coded blocks sized according to some factor for easy visualization. Treemapping is an incredibly slick way to quickly zoom in on capacity problems. But since switching to my Mac I wasn’t aware of similar utilities. In my PC days, I used to use Glary Utilities to clean out the corners of Windows and the awesome treemapping visualizations in WinDirStat to find where my storage was going. And it is usually the folders that you don’t actively manage that are the worst space-wasters!Īll operating systems have their secret corners that fill up with cruft, and many applications do a terrible job of cleaning up after themselves. But even the bloated files produced by Microsoft Office pale in comparison to multimedia photo, music, and video files. You might think that your “Documents” folder takes up most of the room, since you use it all the time and it has so many files in it. The primary culprit in the rampant over-saving of data is a lack of perspective and visualization: We tend to focus on the items we think are at fault rather than the true space wasters.Ĭonsider your PC or Mac: Do you really know what is taking up all of your disk space? Unless you have a good tool, the answer is probably not. When it comes to data storage, out of sight is usually out of mind. Luckily, I found some great tools, and these helped me isolate the space-wasting items quickly and easily. ![]() So I was surprised to see a pop-up window on my Mac telling me that my hard drive was full! It was time to investigate data management applications for OS X. That’s one reason that I upgraded my MacBook Pro’s hard disk to 320 GB! But as a storage and data management consultant, I generally keep my computers much cleaner than my office. Disk Space Analyzer includes the ability to copy or move selected files as opposed to just deleting them, which could be pretty handy (noting that that comparison chart is on the Nektony site so use your own judgement there).Disk Inventory X is an amazing tool to zoom into your full disk and figure out what's taking up all the space! Daisy Disk seems to have a higher profile, and includes the ability to scan your cloud storage for Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. They look pretty similar in UI and functionality. Neither App Store version include hidden files, so aren't going to find those leftover caches. The App Store version of Disk Space Analyzer is free, but it's unclear how much functionality is missing (ie. The App Store version of Daisy Disk also costs USD $9.99, but if you've bought it from the App Store you can get the download version for free. The paid download versions of both cost the same, USD $9.99. The App Store versions of both ( ) and Daisy Disk are limited functionality compared to the versions available from the developers' websites:
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