Moving at the Speed of Creativity - What’s on my hard drive?

What’s on my hard drive?

Published by Wesley Fryer in open source on October 21st, 2005

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If you are getting short on hard drive space, there are two free programs you might check out that can help identify what programs or document files are taking up the most space and perhaps can be deleted.

Disk Inventory X is a free application for Mac OS X that displays a graphical summary of your hard drive, with programs and document types colored differently:

WinDirStat is a similar program for Windows computers, also available for free.

Disk Inventory X is wonderful! It helped me identify 8 gigabytes of space being taken up by a library item of application support for “LiveType,” which is a program that installs with Final Cut Pro. I had deleted Final Cut and the LiveType application from my hard drive, but because there was not a program uninstaller all the library items for the program were left. Now I have 8 GB of additional hard drive space, which I need!

For more information about treemaps, which is the research-based technology from the University of Maryland on which these programs are based, refer to “Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies.”

Thanks to my wonderful friend and technology mentor Patsy Lanclos for this tip!