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GrandPerspective

2007 March 3
tags:
by Tim

If, like me, your computer’s hard drive has slowly filled and you’re not entirely certain where all those gigabytes went, might I cautiously recommend (for Mac OS users) GrandPerspective. It visualizes all the files on your hard drive as rectangles packed roughly intuitively. I’ve used other tools, but this one makes it trivial to locate unusually large files and as well as unusually large directories with one picture.

Grand Perspective graph

This helped me work out that most of the weight in my Mail archive was from one year which seems to have up to 5 copies of the same mail item, often with fat attachments… Check it out. Cool tool.

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  • Ralf

    Nice.

    I also use WhatSize http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/ which isn’t quite as pretty, but a bit more functional Smile Might make a nice complement.

  • Ralf

    Nice.

    I also use WhatSize http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/ which isn’t quite as pretty, but a bit more functional Smile Might make a nice complement.

  • http://www.timbomb.net/blog Tim Mansfield

    Actually, I was using WhatSize, but I found it less functional. Because I had to dig down explicitly into directories, I couldn’t easily compare file sizes across directories and it made it harder to find odd, fat files like that mbox file unless they were very big.

    I examined the hard drive three times or so using WhatSize and never noticed the mbox, with GrandPerspective it jumped out.

    YMMV…

  • timbomb

    Actually, I was using WhatSize, but I found it less functional. Because I had to dig down explicitly into directories, I couldn’t easily compare file sizes across directories and it made it harder to find odd, fat files like that mbox file unless they were very big.

    I examined the hard drive three times or so using WhatSize and never noticed the mbox, with GrandPerspective it jumped out.

    YMMV…

  • markumoto

    I recently used WhatSize to tidy up the hard disk on to Macs. It worked really nicely on one machine, but it took me ages to find a 2.7G directoty on the other mac, for the eaxctly the reason that Tim is describing. Will give GrandPerspective a go next time I need space (although it might be a while since I’ve just purchased an external 300G harddrive Smile

  • markumoto

    I recently used WhatSize to tidy up the hard disk on to Macs. It worked really nicely on one machine, but it took me ages to find a 2.7G directoty on the other mac, for the eaxctly the reason that Tim is describing. Will give GrandPerspective a go next time I need space (although it might be a while since I’ve just purchased an external 300G harddrive Smile

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