Homotron Recommends: Disk Inventory X
Every once in a while, there are these little utility applications that I use that just make life easier, and I've decided to share one of the ones I use with you today (and it's free!): Disk Inventory X.
Since I use a Mac for daily use, my recommendations are going to be Mac focused. Sorry, PC folks. I'm sure tiny dancer might have something for you, but today it's all about the Macs.
What does Disk Inventory X do? Quite simply, you point it towards a drive or folder, and let it go. When it's done, you'll get a treemap of your hard drive that shows you exactly how much room each file is taking up on your drive in a wonderful, graphical, and easy to identify way.
The reason I was reminded of Disk Inventory X is that yesterday, the 20GB of free space I had on my startup drive had somehow completely vanished. I literally had 0KB of space left and Mac OS X was yelling at me and throwing a tantrum for being a horrible caretaker and stuffing it so much.
The fact that I hadn't stuffed anything into my startup drive meant I was not amused 20GB had disappeared from my drive, so I got to work trying to find the culprit.
My mind immediately jumped to iTunes 8.1, which had installed the night before. Sometimes weird things happen when you update iTunes, and I feared this was one of those times.
Comparing my iTunes data with my backup drive (unfortunately) acquitted iTunes of all wrongdoing. Damn.
I started searching through my hard drive using my Finder, finding nothing out of place, until I remembered I had downloaded Disk Inventory X some time ago. I figured I'd give it a shot.
I started Disk Inventory X up and pointed it towards my startup drive, let it scan the drive and minutes later voilà! A treemap was in front of me, and conspicuously sitting right in the middle was a very large square that represented a huge file sitting on my drive. Ah hah! Found the fraking bastard!
Clicking on it gave me all the info on the file: the output log file for an application had somehow ballooned to over 20GBs in size! Apparently, the application had got stuck in an output loop and just chugged along outputting to its log file continuously all night until it simply ran out of room on the drive. Peachy. A simple right click on the offending box let me reveal the file in the Finder and trash that file right away.
Mission accomplished.
If you've got less room free than you'd like on your Mac's drives, give Disk Inventory X a try. It's a very easy way to identify those large files taking space on your drive, and at the price tag of $0, you can't go wrong!
Product Page [Tjark Derlien]
Den Den Boy
Posted to On Your Desk, Reviews on 13 March 2009
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: Disk Inventory X, disk utility, Mac, Mac OS X, Tjark Derlien, utilities
3D iPhone glasses. Why?
Does anyone know if there's anything like this for PC's? I'm not nearly in sync enough with all the apps available, so I take recommendations whenever I can get them.
@ougeoman
http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview//
I used it for a while, then switched to a non-graphical one (treesize free). But it worked fine when I did use it.
(I think there is also some command line trick you can do but it escapes me at the moment.)
The original Sequoiaview had limited file management capabilities, so unless they changed Sequoiaview to include more robust file management, I recommend the following utility instead:
http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/
Windirstat uses the Sequoiaview tree-map engine (and it looks like the posted Disk Inventory X does too), PLUS gives you robust file management options.