Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better, Third Edition

Hack 111: Free Up Hard-Drive Space

Level Easy

Platform Windows, Mac OS X

Cost Free

When you bought your computer two years ago, you thought it had a much bigger hard drive than you’d ever need. However, as your computer aged, all that space got eaten up by who knows what. Hard-drive space is cheap and plentiful, but you don’t have to run out to buy a whole new drive the minute you start pushing your current disk’s space limits. There are easy ways to inventory what’s hogging your hard drive, and then you can offload some of it to external disks or simply delete it.

Visualize Disk Hogs

Two utilities — WinDirStat and GrandPerspective — analyze your hard drive and map its usage statistics. They’re discussed in the following sections.

WinDirStat (Windows)

The free, open-source utility WinDirStat (http://windirstat.sourceforge.net, Windows only) displays your disk usage in a color-coded map that shows what file types and folders take up the most space on your hard drive.

Using WinDirStat, you can easily identify the biggest space hogs on your disk. The utility provides a three-paned view: tree view, list view, and treemap view (see Figure 11-23).

The treemap represents each file as a colored rectangle, the area of which is proportional to the file’s size. The rectangles are arranged so that directories make up rectangles that contain all their files and subdirectories. You can select files by folder name, file type, or colored rectangle, and delete or move them from within WinDirStat. ...