It’s hard to believe that I can fill a 150GB hard drive when it seems like only yesterday that a 500MB drive was considered huge. But with drive size increases have come larger files, especially from digital cameras. This past weekend I was going to put some movies on my iPod so I had to rip them to the hard drive first. That’s when I noticed that I only had 2 GB of space left. That’s just barely enough space for a small photo shoot anymore. Having found myself short on space, I went about the task of backing up little used files and deleting those that were no longer needed. As I started looking around my hard drive with the Finder, I realized that there had to be a better way to find out what was choking my drive. I found it in a free little app called Disk Inventory X.
Disk Inventory X is a free application for the Mac (sorry Windows users) and is released under the General Public License (GPL). What is so great about this program (besides the price) is that it analyzes any drive you like and then gives you a graphic representation of, not only the files, but their sizes too. If you take a look at the screen shot below you will see my file tree on the left, the graphic color representation of my files in the middle, and a list of the file types on the left (listed by size).
If you click on one of the folders, the program will highlight the color block where the files are found, as well as list all the essential information about the files.
So as I started finding out where all the bloat was on my drive, I was really surprised to see where tons of space was being chewed up. Take a look at my Adobe Bridge Cache below.
And here is my Google Earth Cache.
Sometimes clearing these and freeing up space is as simple as opening the program, then looking in the preferences to find the cache clearing function (Google Earth preference below).
After that, it was a matter of finding large groups of files that I could move to my backup drive.
I haven’t finished yet but I am well on my way to freeing up some valuable hard drive space. I have already moved or deleted 14 GB of space and I’m not done yet. While this program doesn’t actually allow you to interact very much with the files or folders it does let you move items to the trash and will also let you open a finder window to the location where your file exists. But beware, searching out your files can be addictive stuff. If you would like more info on Disk Inventory X or would like to download it for yourself, check out their website here.
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thanks, jeff! will try this out. i usually use WhatSize to check my disk usage…