Hard drives just keep getting bigger, but it seems that we’re able to fill whatever space we’re given. With large video files, ISO images and drive image backups it’s easy to fill even the biggest disk in very little time.
The trouble is that many of us tend to use hard drives in a similar manner to a cupboard that’s used to house all the stuff that we’ve got no other room for. Open the door, throw it in and forget it. This approach is fine until you either need to find something or you need some more cupboard space.
Indexing tools like Google Desktop and Windows Desktop Search have made the first problem easier to solve, but that of making more space can be difficult, especially if you’re unable to lay your hands on a virtual pitch fork to muck the drive out. Ideally you need to know what folders and files are taking up the most room and what file types are involved so you can archive or delete them to make more room.
Right clicking a file and choosing properties quickly enables you to find out its size, but it’s not practical to do this for all the hundreds of different files on your system. This is where a tool that enables you to visualise your hard drive space comes into its own. One such free tool is WinDirStat, which you can get at http://windirstat.info/.
The program interrogates your hard drives and gives you the result in a drive map. You can see at a glance the file types that are taking up most room. Depending on the type involved, you may be able to archive them for more space. It also helps to be able to quickly see how much room each folder takes up. You can reveal this information by expanding the drive in the top pane. Selecting a folder or file type results in the corresponding area on the drive map being highlighted. This treemap shows different file types in different colours and gives you an easy overview of the distribution of data on your drive.
Disk View
Find out exactly what’s taking up room on your disk and where it is.
1
Unzip WinDirStat to a convenient location on your hard drive and launch the executable file. Opt to examine all your disks. You’ll see some Pac man like animated characters moving backwards and forwards as your hard drives are examined.
2
Once complete, you’ll see a report on each disk, showing the percentage space used. On the right hand side, there is a break down according to file type, while at the bottom of the window is the treemap, which shows the position of the files on your disk.
3
Select a file type on the right to see it highlighted on the treemap. To include free space in the map choose Options, Show Free space. Select a folder to see the files inside it highlighted. This enables you to see which folders or file types are taking up most space.
