Happiness is finding and deleting the largest unused files on your hard drive.
Have you ever found yourself in a hard drive crunch? You may know that there are large files still hiding out on your computer that don't need to be around anymore. Perhaps you've ripped dvds to disc or done something else that takes lots of space that I can't think of right now. I've been there - today in fact. I've been hovering around 10GB of space on my hard drive and thought, "I should have more space than this. It just feels too full for what I've been doing lately."
I found a new tool called Folder Sizes which really made my day. I downloaded it on a 15-day trial, but it is fully functional even on the trial basis. If you know you've got some old files and folders around taking up a lot of space and you're feeling trigger happy with the Delete key, then I'd give this one a whirl.
It's a small download (3Mb) and unpacks quickly. Upon first run, there are several well written and placed help boxes (which I immediately clicked through). You can turn them off simply by changing a setting on each box. It works in a similar manner that you'd expect a virus checker to work. I was able to narrow my report to one hard drive right away. As the report comes back, I could see which root drive folders were largest. I picked a culprit and drilled down into the folder. Each time I did so, the report was updated with the largest subfolders and files. I found a number of installs as well as temporary files I no longer needed and in less than 15 minutes I had freed over 30GB of space.
Now there are a number of other features, but I didn't even get into them. I saw disc reports and defragmentation information. It didn't matter. I was super happy just to find the largest offenders on my hard drive and destroy them. It definitely made my day. Maybe it'll make yours.
5 comments:
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/treesize.html "TreeSize tells you how your disk space is being used. It can be started from the context menu of a folder or drive and shows you the size of the selected folder, including its subfolders. Each folder can be expanded in Explorer-like manner to view the size of its subfolders. Scanning is done in a thread, so you can already see results while TreeSize is working without having to wait. The results can be printed in a report. This version is a slimmed down, but fully functional and free version of TreeSize Pro and does not offer the graphical pie charts."
-Tom
"SpaceMonger is a free tool for keeping track of the disk space on your computer. Instead of viewing your disk as unhelpful little icons or pie charts, you see a single picture that shows you at a glance how much space every file and folder are using. The latest version of SpaceMonger is always available at its web page: http://www.werkema.com/software/spacemonger.html"
Or you can do it the old fashioned way... "Find by File Size > X Mb"
:-p
I totally agree. All three methods added (especially Kevin's) seem to work. I had just found this tool in 5 minutes of searching and it gave me a quick and dirty way to accomplish my needs. I wouldn't want to assume that this tool was the best of disc space reporting applications. Any other options since we seem to be brainstorming? :P
I personally use the first one i posted. the thing i like about it is that it adds an option to the context menu so you can right click on any folder and get it's breakdown right away
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