Where did all that hard drive space go?!?! I’d say your iTunes, iPhoto, or iMovie libraries, but if you want to know for sure download Disk Inventory X. It’ll tell you everything you need to know. LifeHacker’s Mac download of the day on April 18th was GrandPerspective, but don’t bother with it. Disk Inventory X blows GP out of the water!
The only downfall with Disk Inventory X is that it hasn’t been updated since 2005, but don’t let that prevent you from installing it. Its by far one of my favorite applications to keep a tab on my hard drive usage. I used to be a big fan of WhatSize, but it has no graphical representation of my files. So I now use Disk Inventory X.
I think my hard drive is fairly representative of the average Joe’s drive. I’ve got a big chunk of space dedicated towards music, another to pictures and the rest spread out over the Applications folder, a Parallels VM, and a few games. Be proactive and stay informed as to what is eating up your hard drive space. I can tell you from years of experience, keeping your files organized and staying on top of your disk usage will save you money in the long. You wont find yourself running to the Apple store to buy another drive when you could have easily deleted a few files to get things under control.
The Disk Inventory X interface is simple and very Mac-ish. All of your files are displayed in tree view on the left half of the user interface. On the right half is the graphical representation of your hard drive. When you click on the representation an information window pops up to describe the file. Just about every bit of information that you could want to know about a file is in that window.
Disk Inventory X does one thing and does it well. It shows you where and what files are greedily swiping your hard disk space. Do yourself a favor and do a bit of spring cleaning on your hard drive. While your at it spray all those dust bunnies out of your desktop as well!
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Nick, another alternative is Omni Disksweeper. I think I discovered it through Merlin over on MBW.
It doesn’t have a graphic representation, but it does display the used blocks very clearly here is the post link:
http://myapplestuff.com/time-for-a-clean-sweep/
Good spot though for Disk Inventory X, will check it out.
I installed and checked out Omni Disksweeper and I thought that I opened up WhatSize on accident, lol.
It seems that the two applications are nearly identical. WhatSize has a few different view options other than the 3 column one that Omni Disksweeper uses though. Like you said in your review, Omni Disksweeper doesn’t allow you to delete files through the interface without paying for the $15 version. WhatSize however gives this functionality for free :) Now if only someone would come up with a mashup of Disk Inventory X and WhatSize. If you are still using Omni Disksweeper I’d recommend that you give WhatSize a try.
Will do that. Thanks for the tip on WhatSize. Had a chance to poke around your blog last night and really enjoyed it.
I will be back! And your now in my feeds…
Thanks :)
Does all of your stuff get cross posted on myapplestuff? I’m subscribed to myapplestuff’s feed, but if you have content that you write that you only post on macwingnut I’ll subscribe there as well.
Good luck with WhatSize!
early days for my blog. I don’t have enormous amounts of time as I have a young family. The beauty of MyApple is that there are now 6 members of staff and Chris is the big boss. So there is a chance for me to take a breather and someone else sends an article in.
But it gives me a chance to cut my teeth in the blog world. All new to me.
It’s actually very hard work maintaining the momentum of a blog and generating original content.
I fully respect you as even I would struggle with one post a day.
I too used Disk Inventory X for a while before finding another alternative.
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/
Jdisk gives you bar and pie chart views of your disk and lets you browse the directory pretty easily.
i love Disk X. i have been using it for a while and it helps alot.