Does anyone have a link to a free tool that will quickly show me which folders on my hard disks are taking up the most disk space?

For instance, let's say I'm down to a few hundred megs on drive c: and I want do do some cleanup. I don't mind deinstalling programs, but I'd love to be able to see a graph of which folders on drive C are taking up the most space, and would therefore get me the most bang for my buck in terms of which programs to deinstall.

An example of the sort of thing I'm looking for is here (look at the second screen shot), but that link is for an Access 2000 application. I'm looking for a straight windows-app that doesn't piggyback off of Access.

Anyone got a good one they know about or use?

I regularly use TreeSize Pro.

It displays quite well how much space is in each folder, and does so in an explorer-type fashion coupled with a pie chart of the results. Excellent program.

I don't know how quick you'll find it (it scans the whole drive when starting, although it does cache data somehow, not that I know that any other one would be faster), but I've used Scanner with good success. I find its visualization very intuitive, and it allows for deleting files directly from the utility itself.

Oh, and it's absolutely free (of cost).

but I've used Scanner with good success

Hmmm, what would be an example of using something with bad success?

Windows.

Edit: Okay. To be less glib, I mean that it succeeds at what it claims to do, and it does it well, making it very useful. There are other utilities that do what they claim, but they do it in such a backwards fashion that, although you can get the job done with it, it takes a lot of effort to get it to do what you want, whether that means that it has a poor UI or that it forces you down a path you don't want to go. Both of those describe Windows to me. Neither of them describe Scanner

Windows.

/me... aspirating a Stoned Wheat Thin

I surrender! Bitt, please don't ever do that to me again! I'll be nice!!

I'll accept that statement, but I think that is very subjective. I have the opposite reaction to Windows and feel the same way about Macs.

I also feel that every single Adobe program is a "bad success" as we are defining it

Hmmm. I checked out TreeSize Pro. I don't think I like it:

See if you can figure out why.

I'm not sure I can tell. Why? From the screen shot it doesn't look like it has finished scanning your drive yet.

I've used the PC Magazine utility Diskpie for this task. It is free, and graphically showed me the large files that were filling my ever shrinking drive, now to convince myself to delete them ...

I have not tried Scanner yet, so I can't compare them.

- Mark

Bitt, that "Scanner" utility is exceptionally cool for my personal PC at home. Haven't tried it at work, yet. Wonder if it would a problem there because I have lots of mapped network drives and I'd want to control which ones it scanned and which ones it didn't. We'll see how it goes tomorrow. But for now, it looks like a winner. I love its method for graphing file usage, it tells me everything I need to know at a glance. COOL. Thanks for that link.

See if you can figure out why.

Because it doesn't give the sum of the sizes of the subdirectories under the highlighted directory.

tanstaafl.

Very nice. This has been tossed onto my network archive folder.

And no, I don't have that many games installed...



Oh, Tony, it dosen't scan network drives unless you click on one. I have 4 mapped here on my home PC, and had no network activity until I selected one from the list.

I'm not sure I can tell. Why? From the screen shot it doesn't look like it has finished scanning your drive yet.

Ah. There didn't seem to be any indication that it was still scanning. I assumed that it was done and was screwed up. There wasn't even any real disk activity. Is there something on that screen that indicates that the scan isn't complete?

(The one thing that I don't like about Scanner is that it basically blocks until it's done scanning, with no apparent way to cancel, but it does give a progress indicator, and you at least know when it's done.)

Because it doesn't give the sum of the sizes of the subdirectories under the highlighted directory.

While that's a good reason, the bigger one is that it didn't even list all the directories. Dignan claims that it wasn't done scanning, but I don't know where the indicator is. Maybe that blue and white bar? I assumed that was disk space remaining.

Yes. When the scan is done, the blue bar next to the drive letter will be full.

Another thing I like about the program (I don't know if Scanner does this), is that it loads a shell script so that you can right click on any folder and have Treesize analyze it. I'm going to try out Scanner now and see how I like that one.

Interesting.

Pros:
-I like how visual it makes the whole structure of your hard drive. I prefer seeing what all sections are like at once
-it is very easy to move throughout the folders
-very quick scan! I am definitely impressed by how fast it scanned. I'm not just talking the parallel scanning stuff, but just how fast it could scan a single disk, let alone many, each of which was nearly full (60/80GB, 95/100GB). very impressive.
-very small and simple program

Cons:
-like Tony said, how do you tell it if you don't want a certain drive scanned at the program start? just curious
-I prefer seeing the list of all the folders at once
-Is there way to "order" the results around the pie chart? It appears to list alphabetically, but I prefer storage space. that's the reason I use a program like this. I don't see much use in alphabetizing the list.
-small nit-picking, but in some folders, especially when you get down to just the file level, it inserts white space in seemingly random places around the pie chart. is there a reason for this?


All that said, I'm probably going to use this program too, while using Treesize for more of my file management. Thanks for linking it!

The ONLY con to scanner I can find is that it doesn't show all directories, only big ones.

Wow! You're right! I think that might be the white space I was talking about. It's leaving out some smaller files.

Oh, Tony, it dosen't scan network drives unless you click on one. I have 4 mapped here on my home PC, and had no network activity until I selected one from the list.

Fantastic, then. It should meet my needs perfectly. I'll find out tomorrow.

Like they say, sometimes the best things in life are free.

(The one thing that I don't like about Scanner is that it basically blocks until it's done scanning, with no apparent way to cancel, but it does give a progress indicator, and you at least know when it's done.)

This wasn't the experience I had. I was able to select a different drive icon while it was still scanning, and it seemed to Do The Right Thing: it stopped the existing scan and began scanning the drive I clicked on. Maybe I downloaded a newer version than the one you're running?

like Tony said, how do you tell it if you don't want a certain drive scanned at the program start? just curious

If it behaves well on my win2k box on the company network (i.e., I can abort it while it's in the middle of a scan so that I can start drilling down to other drives), then I actually don't need that feature. All I want to do is to say "Okay, who are the biggest gluttons on this disk drive or this network share?" so I know where to concentrate my cleanup efforts first. As long as I can freely select drives without getting locked out, I don't care if it starts out scanning extra drives. On my home machine, it looks like it behaves well, so I think I'll be OK.

Wow! You're right! I think that might be the white space I was talking about. It's leaving out some smaller files.

Which happens to be a good feature, for my purposes. I only want to see the gluttons.

I'll second TreeSize - very effective at finding those several-hundred meg folders that you forgot about.

My cousin told me that her drive was full and she started deleting documents and stuff to make more room but it didn't seem to have any effect. I found the problem - a 900Mb file in her Temp folder, seems she scanned an A4 page at 19,200dpi and it crapped out and left the file there!

At the time she had a 1.6Gb hard drive and 5 kids who doodled a lot in paint and saved them as BMPs so it was pretty full.

Gareth

blocks until it's done scanning

I was able to select a different drive icon while it was still scanning, and it seemed to Do The Right Thing: it stopped the existing scan and began scanning the drive I clicked on. Maybe I downloaded a newer version than the one you're running?

Nah. You've probably just got a faster hard drive than I do. Mine's ridiculously slow.

Well, the Scanner program worked well on my work system, does everything I need it to do. Thanks again.

By the way, you can right-click on a drive and un-check "Summary" to prevent it from including that drive in the boot-up summary if you like.

This BBS is great. I could have really used one of these tools the other day when I had an urgent need to create space on a 'doze box.

I'm going to check these out later. I found enough space to deal with the issue at the time, but I'm sure that more can be found.

For Unix, there's a tool called kdirstat, that uses treemaps, which are just a generally cool way of visualizing things like disk space usage.

You can get free TreeMap classes in Java or the original TreeMap stuff at U. Maryland. The original inspiration for TreeMaps was mapping out your directory usage, and it's built in to the Maryland tool (which slammed my hard drive for almost a minute, but managed to produce a decent map showing me that I'm burning an awful lot of disk space on my image files).

I'm burning an awful lot of disk space on my image files

Perhaps it is time to speak with these people

Funny... After seeing that groovy screen shot I had to download that utility... only to be told I already have it in my Downloads/Utilities folder. Heh... guess why my hard-drive is getting full.

It looks awfully complicated. What I usually do when I run out of space is search the drive for folders over a certain Megabyte size... say 25MBs. Then I sort by size and I can selectively delete the larger files... Doesn't help if you have big folders with lots of little files.

What I usually do when I run out of space is search the drive for folders over a certain Megabyte size... say 25MBs. Then I sort by size and I can selectively delete the larger files...

Right, exactly. That's what this utility does. Only it shows it to you in one step, in one clear screen, with a super-easy-to-navigate interface.

The thing that this utility helps with is the first step: "Search the drive for the big folders". This utility shows that very thing (which folders are the biggest) in one step, automatically. I don't know how to do that in one step from Windows Explorer or from a batch file. The only way I know how to do it is with a third-party program like this one.

It looks awfully complicated.

It's really just the opposite. It's very simple, actually. The interface looks strange at first, but once you understand it, it's so simple and clear, and presents you with exactly the information you need.

Now that a couple of my issues with the Scanner program have been cleared up (thanks for the summary tip, Tony), here's my two remaining nitpicks about the program that keep it from becoming my tool for freeing up disk space:

One reason is that I like to be able to tell exactly what all the folders are at a glance and how large each of them is. There is no way to do that in Scanner without moving the mouse over an area you are interested in. It seems like an inefficient way of going about it. Plus, if you go down one path, and want to go into a different folder elsewhere on the drive, you first have to go back up the tree before selcting the next folder.

Like I said, I prefer to be able to see all the folders at once.

My suggestion (to the programmer) to make this a little easier is this: toss out that annoying "back" button. Currently, the center circle is never used for anything. no context menus no-nothing. I suggest that clicking on that takes you up a level. That would make navigating much quicker and more intuitive, IMO. You never have to take the cursor off the chart.


The other MAJOR issue I have with it is that it lists things in alphabetical order. How is this useful in any way when you're trying to free up space? The point is that you don't know which folder is taking up space, and which is taking up the most space. I doubt anyone is going into this program and looking for a specific folder by name when they are freeing space.

That said, I think it's fine to have the option to alphabetize the list, but I would think it would be absolutely required that you be able to list them by size around the pie chart. My guess is that it doesn't look as good as the randomness that appears when in alphabetical order.

Those are my last complaints. If you think these are off-base, let me know

I agree. Write him about those things.

I also think that the center circle needs to be able to do things when you click and/or right-click on it. For instance, I'd like the same right-click context menu to be available for the center circle as it is for the sub-folders.

Hehe, well, I think I'd write the guy who wrote Treesize. If he added the option to view the pie charts like you see in Scanner, I would be quite happy, but for now that's the only thing I like better about Scanner. I can still click on the directories in the Treesize pie and it will take me to that directory, so it's almost the same.

Oh well, to each his own