This colorful little app is GrandPerspective, my new favorite little bit of freeware for OS X. You can guess what it does. Give it a directory (which can be root level if you like) and it scans everything from there onwards, sizing every file it can find.
Then it displays this wonderful view of your files as little colored boxes; related files are grouped, and just by moving your pointer over them you can see from the text field below what’s what. All your music files appear as a mass of fairly small little squares. Big stuff, like swap files, is easy to spot.
As are space hogs. At the weekend, when a friend asked me why his 30GB disk was nearly full even though he had less than 4GB of music files, I suggested he use GrandPerspective to weed out the hogs. And guess what, after 30 minutes he’d identified nearly *8GB* of unwanted, unnecessary stuff that he could delete. Neat.
Disk Inventory X is another piece of freeware that has a very similar design. I haven't used GrandPerspective, so I can't say how they size up, but if you ever become dissatisfied with GrandPerspective I highly suggest giving Disk Inventory X a go. :)
I have Disk Inventory X too, cleaning disks from a tree-map is a pleasure. Bummer that neither GrandPerspective or Disk Inventory X are universal apps yet. Source code is avialable for both, anyone able to recompile them for Intel?
JDiskReport is quite a good free tool for this as well. Don't be turned off by the fact it is a java application.
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/index.html
For Linux users, there is a similar tool called gdmap (or apt-get install gdmap).
Thanks, Giles. GrandPerspective found an invisible StuffIt temp file that was sucking up 1.9GB of space!
Ah, now I know what the hierarchical file system is good for... ;-)
hi there,
how is this utility different from JDiskReport ?
Thank you,
BR,
~A
it seems to be an almost identical interface to sequoia view -> http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/
sean