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 Inventory X is an amazing tool to zoom into your full disk and figure out what's taking up all the space!
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