Picture this scenario: You’ve run low on storage space on your computer, and you don’t want buy a USB drive or external disk. For once, you tell yourself, “I’m finally going to delete some of the clutter from my hard drive.” But after you look at how cluttered your folder is, you throw in the towel.

Chances are that at some point in your life, you’ll run low on storage on your device. When the time comes to axe some files, many users are daunted by the mess of folders and files on their system. But rest assured, your situation is not hopeless. If there were a way to X-ray through all the disorder and see all our files and folders at once, wouldn’t that be great?

Fortunately, there is such an application. Even better, Mac, Windows, and Linux can all enjoy the benefits of a family of programs. For Windows, it’s WinDirStat; for Linux, it’s KDirStat; and last but not least, for Macs, it’s Disk Inventory X.

The beauty of Treemaps

Take a look at this screenshot:

From a single window, you can see:

• Every single file, as a rectangle
• The size of the file, represented by the area of the rectangle in relation to others
• The type of file (e.g. PowerPoint, video file), represented by its color
• A general overview of the folder structure. Notice how the rectangles appear to be nested.

The Treemap, as it’s called, is possibly one of the best visualizations of a user’s hard disk space. No matter how disorganized you may be, WinDirStat/KDirStat/Disk Inventory acts as a giant pair of X-ray glasses, letting no file hide. After running the program, you may realize “oh, there’s that 2 GB video that I’ve already backed up”, or “I don’t need this program anymore”. Now you can happily remove the space hogs from the system.

If you’re looking to free up some storage, I encourage you to check out this helpful utility. Even if you have oodles of space available, give WinDirStat/KDirStat/Disk Inventory X a try, and see what your hard drive looks like.

Links

• WinDirStat, for Windows users
• KDirStat, for Linux users
• Disk Inventory X, for Mac users