Where is all the space on my hard drive?

Where is all the space on my hard drive?

That was the fateful search that lead me down a dark road of command line mayhem for an hour or so. That's .0000028% of my waking life! After that hour, I finally came across the tool that I needed and discovered what was taking up space on my hard drive in a couple of minutes. Now I'm installing the latest Adobe Suite and have a few minutes to pass on the good news.

A simple way to tell what's taking up space on your hard drive

Here is is: TreeSize Free. Here's a little screenshot, so you can get a feel for what it does:

TreeSize Free: TreeSize Free

I've spent years right-clicking on folders and selecting "Properties" to get the file size. You're laughing at me, I'm sure. For big folders like "My Documents", it can take several minutes to get the final total, and then you still have to drill down to find out where the culprits are hiding. I've probably wasted a good 5-10 hours (.000028% of a lifespan) using that method.

Today, it hit me that someone else, who is smarter than me, had found a better solution to the problem. After doing the "Where is all the space on my hard drive" search, I was lured into a command-line administrative tool offered by Microsoft called DIRUSE. I've been resistant, but geekily attracted to using the command line, and have successfully executed a few database transfers using that technique. For some reason, though, I kept running into problems with DIRUSE, and it seemed to take an awful long time to execute.

I love free software that works, and now that I've reclaimed half of my hard drive back, I'm ready to start rat-packing again.

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