Iris Classon
Iris Classon - In Love with Code

Stupid Question 228- 229: Why don’t I have any free disk space left? And what is a disk usage analyzer?

[To celebrate my first year of programming I will ask a ‘stupid’ questions daily on my blog for a year, to make sure I learn at least 365 new things during my second year as a developer]

I have a 128 GB SSD. I do video editing and recording, image editing and illustrations and programming and … and … and 128 isn’t a lot. Where does it all go?

You can right click on all your folders and check the size, or you could use powershell and for example type a command such as:

gci -r | sort Length -desc | select fullname -f 50

(get all childitems, sort by length,d escending, get full name of top 50)
powershell_get_largest_files
Look at that. But, it takes too long, and I want to do a full search. That would take very long.

One of my favorite tools is to use a disk usage analyzer, which is a program that helps you visualize how disk space is being used on your computer. There are quite a few, but my favorite is the open source software WinDirStat. It’s fast, simple, accurate and helps me locate and clear up some space fast.

space_on_computer

You can customize the graphical representation of the disk usage, and a few more things. I recently did a scan and noticed a zipped PPT file that was rather large, and I moved it to a backup disk instead.

space_on_computer2

You can also empty your recycle bin from the program, a simple delete doesn’t delete files, it just moves them to the bin in contrast to shift+ delete. This goes for windows in general not just the application, but I’m sure you already knew that.

space_on_computer3

You can also have user defined cleanups (saved commands), but I don’t quite trust that feature (or myself with the feature).

2013-08-10 05-32-51

For me this time, I decided to remove the almost 3 GB of Android, the large PPT and some video and project files for video editing found with the PowerShell command. Hope this helps :)

Comments

Leave a comment below, or by email.
Jarmo Jokela
8/13/2013 11:56:34 PM
Good stuff, I like to use WinDirStat as well. If you want to have a overview of disk usage, there's a nice powershell example in stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/868264/du-in-powershell

Also check out Scott Hanselman's guide how you can free some extra gigs: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GuideToFreeingUpDiskSpaceUnderWindows7.aspx 


Last modified on 2013-08-13

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