Where Has All My Hard Drive Space Gone?
Every once in a while I realize that I'm running low on hard drive space on one of my machines. When that happens (like it recently did when I copied files from my backup to a fresh install of Vista on my laptop and it took for freaking ever) I turn to a little utility I found a while back called WinDirStat. This handy (and free open source) utility will scan your whole hard disk once and then show you the results in 3 different views. It has a tree view that is sorted in descending order based on size of the directory and all subdirectories. Second it has a list of file extensions and how much space they take up. Again, it is sorted in descending drive space order. Third it has a cool graphical view of the entire drive where each box is a file proportional to the size it is on the hard disk. The larger the file, the larger the corresponding box in the graph.
The graphical view is what really grabbed me when I first stated using WinDirStat. It is very easy to spot those huge files that eat all of the hard disk space. To find out what the file is, just click on it in the graph and the tree view will adjust, expanding down to where the file is located and select it. In the screenshot at the bottom there are 2 large files in green. Those are my page file and hibernation file.
When I first ran WinDirStat it took about 10 seconds (after the initial scan which took about a minute) to spot 3 .iso images I still had on my hard drive that I had used and forgotten about. That's an easy way to free up a few GB of space.
I used the program a few times before I really started to pay any attention to the extension list. The more I use WinDirStat the more I like that section. As you can see from the screenshot, I have 4.5 GB of mp3 files on my machine (wow, those eMusic files add up fast, but that is another post).
The final thing that I really like about this program is that you can download the binaries, put them in a directory and run them. No install is necessary. I love utilities like this.