How in the Tech

Where Has All My Harddrive Space Gone

By Adam Myers ⋅ November 24, 2008 ⋅ Tags: File Management

It wasn’t long ago that most computer users were extremely conscientious as to what went on their hard drives. You see, when you only had a 1GB hard drive, you didn’t have quite the luxuries that you do today. In a decades time of computing we’ve progressed from a few hundred megabyte hard drives to the 1.5TB monstrosities. It would be safe to assume that running out of space is a thing of the past, and logistically speaking that tends to make sense. Ironically, that tends not to be the case. As all of us have become so accustomed to the abundance of storage space, we tend to become digital pack rats. High speed Internet is so prevalent that it isn’t long before our 250GB hard drive is filled with pictures, videos, or music. Our storage habits have gotten us into trouble.

For most users, myself included, they just replace their filled hard drive with the latest and greatest in storage technology. It’s often easier and cheaper to replace rather than reduce. Realistically, you may spend hours going through your hard drive looking for files that are no longer necessary. Windows doesn’t make this an easy process to begin and finish. However, there is a tool that can be quite handy if you are trying to change your pack rat habits. WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for all iterations of Windows. It’s unique offering is that of a graphical overview of the data on your hard drive, in color-coded blocks and size appropriate sizes. Visually you can quickly identified large files, or clusters of similar files. Here’s a pictorial overview of this handy free utility.

1. At first launch you are prompted to chose which drive (or folder) you wish to scan. I only have one hard drive in my laptop, C:.



2. Select the appropriate drive and click OK. WinDirStat will begin it’s thorough scan; it may take a few minutes depending on the size of the drive in question.
3. Once completed, WinDirStat will display a three-panel – not unlike the older style email programs. You will see a tree-menu representation of your files on the left, a color-coded legend on the left, and an overall size relative visual of your hard drive on the bottom.
4. Using the tree-view, I’ve identified a trash folder from the Microsoft program Foldershare. This is over 4GB in size but is completely safe to delete.

   

5. Expanding the folder and cross referencing it with the color-coded box, I can tell mainly a bunch of video podcasts.



6. Back in the tree-view window I am able to drill down on a file by file basis and delete files or folders in entirety with a simple right-click.



7. The tree-view can be a daunting view of your data. For some, the complete graphical view of your hard drive in the  bottom panel is best. Here is the portion of my hard drive that contains the video podcasts we found in the tree-view. Notice the size of blocks relative to other blocks. Larger blocks are larger files. It’s not hard to see that this makes it very simple to find large files, or large clusters of files of the same color. From this information you can determine what the best course of action may be.