Reclaim Your Hard Drive Space the Easy Way
How many times have you run out of space on your C: drive and wondered… where did all my free space go? If you are tech savvy you'll probably open up your CCleaner shortcut and clean out the temp files, but where has the rest gone?
The answer is a great little freeware utility called DriveSpacio that helps you find out where all that free space has gone, similar to the more well known WinDirStat utility. The benefit of using this one is that it integrates directly into the Explorer shell and has a lot more reports.
Using DriveSpacio
Once you've downloaded and opened the utility, you'll see a screen with the hard drives in your computer. For instance, if you look in my Computer dialog, you'll see 3 hard drives and some other USB drives.
So the Drives tab in DriveSpacio will show you a graphical view of all drives on your computer, with all sorts of great charts and graphs.
Different views are offered, such as pie charts or the bar graph view seen below:
DriveSpacio integrates into Windows Explorer so you are able to right click on a drive and analyze it. You can also launch the application and open a specific drive, or even just a specific sub-folder if you want. I find this to be helpful because I can choose to only look in my user folder.
After scanning you really get a nice chart of the folders and files on the drive and exactly how much space they are taking up.
The interface has an explorer type feel and you can go through each folder and directory to get statistics, and the graph on the right-hand pane will change based on where in the tree you are.
You can also right-click on anything and choose to delete it right from the DriveSpacio window.
The Folders tab gives a great in-depth look at what folders are hogging space. You can toggle between either a bar graph or a pie chart, and choose to alternate between showing Kilobytes, Megabytes, or Gigabytes.
Another benefit of using this application is that there's a portable version that doesn't require any installation. Very useful for adding to your portable USB flash toolkit.
Do you have some info for freeing up space as in above article for a mac
I used the portable version - it worked great. Infact, I was in need of something like this for a client who filled up his 80GB laptop.
Another useful tool that I have been using for a while now is TreeSize Professional.
DriveSpacio doesn't scan NTFS ACL protected folder like "System volume information" even when you run it as an administrator because it doesn't use the backup privilege. I prefer "windirstat" with "makemebackup" instead.
Hmmm…
Both Drive Spacio and windirstat appear to be harmless programs.
Windirstat appears to be the better contender in that case.. Have you an idea where I obtain a copy?
With the programs I have writing to my cache like Office Enterprise and not to mention the other data they write with this help I can both correct problems and know when my programming needs a bit of find/replace tweaking.
This is a pretty nifty little program. The developer did a good job. I sent this to all my friends. I used to have a 40gb HD and I recently upgraded to a 120GB HD, and I already have used over 40GB, so I am confused as to where the space went so quick. I love this program.
I think that this is a fab program that is showing me just how much i need to backup.