Make space on your hard drive using treemaps

Somehow the 60GB on my SSD is never enough for windows (sigh) and I’m always doing house cleaning to make sure it has enough free space. Treemaps help me visualise the data and clear out the biggest space hogging offenders.

I designed my desktop I opted for a superfast but small SSD drive for the windows OS and a big 1TB raid for everything else ( i’ve also another 200MB SSD for cache files and program files). VFX generates a bucket load of data. It’s important to keep on top of my house keeping.

SpaceSniffer

SpaceSniffer is a disk space analyzer. It creates a visual map of your drive. Allowing you to quickly understand where the junk is and delete it. It is standalone, (i.e.no install).  Took about a minute to do my 60GB SSD drive.

It uses a treemap algorithm to generate the visualization. The link to the Maryland department of computer science shows a bunch of different implementations of the algorithm…. pretty cool if your into info graphics 🙂

SpaceSniffer is FREE and it looks like this

WinDirStat

WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for various versions of Microsoft Windows. It is also uses treemaps and is free
http://windirstat.info/

Compare and sync folders.

freefilesync (free )

http://www.freefilesync.org/index.php

winmerge (free)

http://winmerge.org/

Syncback ( free / paid )

http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html

Beyond Compare (paided)

http://www.scootersoftware.com/index.php

use the command prompt

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