Computer Spa Day, which we talked about before (for both mobile and regular computers), will save you time and money.
I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t able to install Apple’s mammoth iPad SDK on my two-year old MacBook Pro because I was out of hard drive space. Luckily, some genius named “eriban” wrote a donation-only program called GrandPerspective.
GrandPerspective employs a heat map, an amazing visual tool I first experienced in the financial industry to show volume, market cap, industry, and movement of stocks in a market. Eriban applies it to the files and folders on your hard drive to identify what’s taking up the most space.
For example, here’s a scan of my hard disk:
The larger the rectangle, the larger the file. As you can see, I have some mammoth stuff going on. The entire left side of the heat map, representing over 50% of my drive space, is taken up by VMWare Fusion Virtual Machines.
Using this heatmap, I was quickly able to identify the files and folders that were hogging my disk space and eliminate them. For one of the virtual machines, I disposed of old snapshots I didn’t need any more. Some of the other large boxes were large downloads or applications I haven’t touched in months. ¡Adios!
In one hour, I freed up over 60 GB of space on my hard drive. Thanks so much, Grand Perspective.
2 Comments
Larry,
There is also a program (which I highlighted at MILOfest) called Disk Inventory X. Uses the same graphic representation of used space (and file formats), and it lets you directly go to that file on the HD for instant deletion.
Both are great tools for clearing up unused space – ridiculously useful on my puny MB Air 80 GB hard drive.
Victor
I would love to see a heatmap of the U.S. budget. I bet that would reveal some big ugly rectangles.