I want to quickly find which files and folders are wasting the most space on Windows.
Does anyone have any suggestions for fast, efficient, and intuitive disk utilities for this?
Not the same question as: Disk space monitor - where did my disk space go?
Personally I love WinDirStat: https://windirstat.info/
I find it really handy for visually finding massive large files, for example that directory your video editing program uses to cashall its data before writing the final copy and never deleting its working files.
Its based heavily on the k4dirstat KDE program, but I find windirstat is far cleaner and less bloated than k4dirstat.
Original referrer: I found this tool thanks to Daren Kitchen's web podcast Hak5, episode 814 https://archive.org/details/youtube-VFCeXIM1Bko (at 16:40). The linked video shows it in use.
Wiztree is getting good reviews.
It's free and portable too. It even detects changes like deleted folders.
WizTree is similar to applications like WinDirStat, TreeSize and Folder Size but is MUCH faster
Features:
- Finds the files and folders using the most space on your hard drive
- VERY Fast! WizTree reads the master file table (MFT) directly from NTFS formatted hard drives (similar to the way Everything Search Engine works)
- Visual Treemap allows you to spot large files and large collections of smaller files at a glance
- Finds the largest files on your hard drive. Every single file on your hard drive can be sorted in order of size.
- File Name Search - quickly locate files by name or wildcard match
- Sort the contents of your entire hard drive by folder size and optionally delete files and folders
- Scan ALL hard drive file system types (NTFS, FAT, FAT32, network, etc) and/or individual folders
Screenshot:
My all time favorite remains 'Scanner' bij Steffen Gerlach even though it is not as fully featured as I usually like my software to be.
There is information for each section on mouse-over and you can click on any of the pie sections to redraw the pie using that as the 'root'. As far as I know, there is no other program for windows that presents this kind of UI (I have not read the other answers yet and I look forward to being proven wrong).
I did find a program like this with a more 'beautiful' UI but it was for Mac. It was years ago and I forget the name.
From the website:
- Generate disk treemaps for local or network volumes
- Search and locate files in treemaps by automatic zoom-in and positioning.
- Save entire or partial volume snapshots
- Compare snapshot against current disk state or past snapshots
- Examine changes by difference in size or percentage difference
- Copy/Move/Rename/Delete files or directories
- Directory analysis
- Tool: Compare files and/or directories
- Tool: Find duplicate files
Pictures are often worth a thousand words, so here are a few screenshots of the program.
(I blurred personal information, but you should still be able to understand how it works)
(It can take some time to scan everything, depending on the size of the drive/directory and the speed of the hard drive - but I guess that's the case with every program)
Unfortunately this program doesn't have a fancy pie chart view.
My personal favorite is SpaceSniffer, although I'm using WinDirStat too. SpaceSniffer is freeware and it doesn't require installation.
The best tool I have found so far is the oldest. It is called Disk Piecharter and was originally written for Windows 95 & 98. It still works on Windows 10. It's fast and easy to use. After you pick a disk drive to scan, it runs for a minute then presents a piechart that represents the top level in the disk directory tree. You can pick the pie slice you are interested in and it will redraw the piechart for the selected directory. If you want to go back up the directory tree, then pick outside the piechart. This way you can navigate right to the biggest folders that are of interest. IMHO, this is the quickest way to find the folders that are eating the lions share of disk space.
The program is a stand alone exe. The only problem... this application is no longer supported, but I don't care because it works fine as is.
