Where has my disk space gone?

At some point or another all of us have asked this question, or a variant of it. We all buy computers with lots of disk space, but the files seem to expand to occupy the available space. It doesnt seem to matter how large the disk is when you buy your computer, you quickly run out of space.

So how can you find out where your disk space has gone?

You may have struggled with file-manager and searched to try and find large files, but as they say ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ .

Visualise disk space usage with WinDirStat

Well now you can see a picture of how your disk space is being used. The big ‘blobs’ are the files that are taking up the space, so on my laptop the largest files are my Outlook PST file and my local email Archive.

The treemap represents each file as a colored rectangle, the area of which is proportional to the file’s size. The rectangles are arranged in such a way, that directories again make up rectangles, which contain all their files and sub-directories. So their area is proportional to the size of the sub-trees. The color of a rectangle indicates the type of the file, as shown in the extension list. The cushion shading additionally brings out the directory structure. The information is nicely colour coded so all of the files of the same type are the same colour. In my case the purple blobs in the middle of the screenshot are a collection of photos from my holiday last year.

WinDirStat will quickly show you where your disk space has gone, which applications are using the space,which file types are using most of your disk space. So you could see if the space is being used by graphics, MP3 file etc.

Where to get WinDirStat

WinDirStat is a tool released under the GNU General Public License, you can download a copy of it from http://windirstat.info/index.php.

If you want to find out where your disk space has gone get hold of a copy of WinDirStat today and see what the space hogs are.

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