Hard Drive Full? Find Out Whats Wasting Space - WinDirStat
September 4th, 2007 by Justin CarmonyI have a 300GB External Hard Drive from Seagate that I’ve been using religiously for the past two years. I use it to make back ups of all sorts, store application installs and all my drivers. Well, today after so many good days of using it as a backup for all my important files, it finally was filled up.
However, deep down inside me I knew for a fact that there was a lot of junk files I no longer needed. Before when I had a Hard Drive get too full I had to browse my folders, right click on properties and try to find files that I didn’t need. I’d spend 30 mins clearing old small files saving 100 MB, only to find later a 6 GB file that wasn’t needed either.
So, this time around I had a quest to find a way to scan my hard drive and have it show me exact what is where taking up how much space. I found WinDirStat.
WinDirStat is an open-source program (meaning free to use) that scans a hard drive and shows stats on the percentage of folders and what space they are taking up. It also displays graphically how your hard drive space is being used in “chunks.”
Here is a picture of my hard drive. This is after I had deleted some huge backup files that were useless and not needed. As you see it will take a color and assign it to a type of file. Now, I notice I have these large green chunks in the corner. Now I remember when I was doing some Linux Desktop testing, I made around 4-5 virtual PCs with VMWare. In total they are taking up 25+ GB. I now can delete these files and now I have freed up 25 GB on my external HD.
A Word of Warning - Make sure you know what the heck you’re deleting. Don’t just start going “delete” crazy, especially if you are running this on your main hard drive (for most of you this is your C Drive). You can easily delete important files for programs you use if you are not careful. I don’t delete programs through this, I uninstall them. This is good for finding files like game demos, movies, etc. that you have on your machine that are large files and you don’t need them. If you fubar your machine using this program, its your own fault. When in doubt, don’t delete.
Hopefully this little program will help you like it helped me. Until next time, and feel free to leave comments if you have questions.
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