Computer Spa Day: Reclaim Hard Drive Space on Mac OS X with GrandPerspective

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.