Where did all my disk space go? Disk Inventory X tells you

I recently bumped up the disk storage on my MacBook. The 120GB stock drive could not handle all of the things I wanted to do on the machine. Between my photo collection, videos for editing and all the software I've been trying out, I needed more space. So I got as much disk as would fit (at the time) into my MacBook: a 320GB drive from Western Digital. Formatted it dropped down to just under 300GB but that was plenty of space for what I needed.

I became very cavalier about my disk usage since I had so much and just 6 weeks into my Mac experience I was burning up over 240GB of disk space! Okay, a lot of that was video but there's a lot of other things in there too.

Paul, a commenter on one of my blog posts recommended that I try out Disk Inventory X, a tool for determining where all the space went. Disk Inventory X builds a graphical tree of where your disk space is being used and gives you some basic management capabilities while in there - which is deleting files for the most part.

It takes a little while to load - at least against the 240GB of files I had - because it rips through your entire hard drive looking for every file. Took about 2 minutes to display the main window, though it's plenty quick after that. There's a MacBreak Minute video the author hosts that walks you through the application - it's a link on his home page.

If you are low of disk space or are just wondering where all that free space went, check it out.

Comments

Paul Thompson said…
Glad you find it useful. Cheers for the namecheck!

Paul
March 16, 2008 at 9:41 AM
David Alison said…
You got it Paul - thanks for the tip!
March 16, 2008 at 11:22 AM
Fifteen said…
Hi You can also try WhatSize. The older version is free for use. http://downloads.zdnet.co.uk/0,1000000376,39188705s,00.htm?r=1
March 16, 2008 at 4:30 PM
SD said…
There is the exact equivalent on Windows : WinDirStat
March 17, 2008 at 12:08 PM
Anonymous said…
Another way to reclaim space is by getting rid of irrelevant language files and code libraries. As you Mac is Intel you don't need to carry PPC code around. Have a look at Monolingual and Xslimmer.
October 24, 2008 at 5:55 PM
Dave said…
Whatsize is crippleware, and has limited use on the free older edition
June 5, 2009 at 1:00 PM
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