Finding the Big Files on Your Hard Drive to Make More Free Space

You know that horrible feeling you get when your computer tells you that you've run out of disk space? What could be taking up all that room, you wonder. Not knowing where to start, often users will start deleting folders which they do not recognize. I once had a user try to delete his "Windows" folder because it was taking up too much space, then wonder why his computer started acting funny.

Fortunately for us Mac users, there's a great little free application which will show you that 8Gb DVD rip on your hard drive which you had forgotten about, or that back up of your music collection from 2003 which is just taking up space.

Disk Inventory X is quite possibly the most useful 2Mb application on any platform. Not only can it show you which directories are taking up the most space on your disk, but also show you large files which you can delete from Disk Inventory X or examine them in the Finder.

Opening up the program shows you all the volumes available and the free space on each of them.

For this example we'll be taking a look at my Macintosh HD. Selecting the volume sends Disk Inventory X indexing every file on the volume, which can take a while. Once it has finished you'll be presented with this screen.

The left hand side of this screen shows how large each directory is, and you can expand out each directory to examine its subdirectories. The rectangles on the right may appear a little cryptic, but each colour represents a different file type. For instance, the dark blue rectangles are movie files, while the red ones are applications. Clicking on any rectangle will tell you what each file is and how large it is.

For instance, this large green rectangle represents the latest version of X-Code, a 923Mb file. Since I have successfully installed X-Code, I no longer need to keep the installer, so I can safely delete it.

However, this 2Gb file, called sleepfile, is a rather important system file. It is used to store the content of your Mac's memory when it goes into sleep mode. Best to leave it alone.

So with a copy of Disk Inventory X, you can almost instantly find where all that hard disk space has gone, identify unnecessary file and archive/delete them. Once you get rid of all your unnecessary files and you still run down to just a spare GB or 2, it's time to get another hard drive.

Still have questions or some tips of your own for using a hard drive efficiently? Let us know in the MFM Forum thread below.

Click here to go to the forum discussion of this article!
(There are 2 comments about this article)

What is this?

Tell A Friend

Print Page