Things I learned clearing disk space

shubhro.com

5 points·shbhrsaha··7 comments

If you are on OS X, Disk Inventory X (http://www.derlien.com/) is quite useful for this as it uses visual treemaps (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/index.shtml) allowing you to quickly see which files are bloating your system.

There is WinDirStat (https://windirstat.info/) on Windows and quite a few similar tools on Linux such as Baobab, KDirStat, etc... (http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-analyze-your-disk-usage-...)

Grandperspective seems to be working very fine on OSX. I like the NCurses ncdu very much as a more general solution since it works in my mac but also on my servers.

I use the ncdu cli tool for reviewing what folders consume the most space.

https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu

Whoa. I just downloaded ncdu and it scanned my system drive in 3 or 4 seconds. How is that possible?

Do you have a SSD drive ? It's also faster to scan and find many big files, rather than a lot of small files even if it totals the same size.

It's also incredibly fast if you are attempting to scan a folder you don't have access to ...

I do have an SSD but other methods to find big dirs/files are much slower. Like

find / -xdev -type f -size +${2:-100}M -exec echo {} && du -h {} & \; ; }

I like PA Storage Monitor on Windows - lets you find large files, files of a type, disk hogs, and (what I like most) lets you compare folder sizes over time.

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