Find space hogs on your hard drive!

Apr 27
11:48

2012

Alan D. Crowetz

Alan D. Crowetz

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An article describing Treesize Free, an excellent application used to find large files on your hard drive taking up space.

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We’ve all been there,Find space hogs on your hard drive! Articles yes, even us IT guys… the dreaded moment where your hard drive is full and you no longer have any more space to store your data. But is that really the case? You could swear just the other day you had a ton of space left! Well, one of the toughest things to find on your hard drive with the built in tools Windows provides you is finding the space hog on your PC. Sure, you could go folder by folder doing folder size counts, but it takes forever and sometimes it’s like finding a needle in a haystack.

The nice folks over at JAM software have made a great little freebie utility called Treesize Free which will help you find those space hogs on your PC. To find the free version of the software, head to the following link: http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/ and click on the free Download link on the page. Once installed, open TreeSize and review the menu bars. If you only have a “C” drive on your PC, TreeSize will immediately begin scanning your directory structure and give you breakdowns of the size of each root folder. Give the scanning process a few minutes to complete. Once you see the sizes have stopped growing, you can feel free to break down each folder and you will see the sizes broken down all the way to the file level if you dig far enough. This should help you uncover tons of missing space! Keep in mind, don’t go delete crazy… make sure what you are deleting is truly safe to delete. Unless you know what you are doing, we highly recommend against going into the Windows or Program Files folders and randomly deleting files as this can have detrimental (or catastrophic!) effects on your system.

For those power users who wish to have advanced search and reporting capabilities, check out the paid version of Treesize Professional, which has robust features that allow you to search by file size and type.

We hope you enjoy this cool utility, and as always, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact Infostream at our website: http://www.infostream.cc