Have you ever wondered what was using up your hard drive space? Or have you come across a time when your hard drive was full and you couldn’t tell what was using up all the space so you can free some up? Browsing through your directory tree and checking the properties on levels upon levels of folders can be time consuming and frustrating and can be difficult to get the answer you are looking for.
There is a handy utility you can download for free called SpaceSniffer that will scan the drive of your choice and give you a visual breakdown of the size of the files and folders on your computer allowing you to see what is using your precious disk space. SpaceSniffer is an executable you can run without installing that gives you a graphical view of your drive starting with the root of the drive and working its way down into smaller sized directories.
Clicking on one of the boxes that represents a folder will show more details about the size of itemssubfolders within that folder. Right clicking the box will bring up the typical options that you would get when right clicking on the folder itself in Windows Explorer such as cut, copy, delete, properties and so on. Like in this example if you double click the AppData box it will bring up a new window with details about that folder.
There is a toolbar at the top that gives you other options and features to help you diagnose your hard drive usage. The back, forward and home buttons work like a web browser to allow you to navigate your drives. There are also buttons to let you rescan your drive and change the detail level of the results. The use file classes style button changes the view and color codes it displays to show different types of file classes. Clicking on the star button will show you how much free space you have left. The ghost button will show space that is not known about or has not been scanned.
Once you find the culprit of your hard drive space usage you can click on it and choose Open and it will take you right to that folder. Then you can decide if you need to do anything like move or delete files to get your space back. Just be sure to make sure the files are something you should be moving or deleting before doing so! If you want to change the way the program looks and behaves you can go to the Configure settings under the Edit menu and change things such as display colors, fonts, animations and detail levels. There is also an option to export your scan results to a text file in case you need someone else to analyze the results for you.
Spacesniffer can be downloaded from their website.
