Take stock on space
mijlee (488 points) | Thu, 2006-08-17 06:16
Ever wondered where all of that space has gone on your hard disk? Need to save valuable Mb? Disk Inventory X to the rescue!
I had a new MacBook with standard design software installed (no video apps apart from iLife). I had partitioned 20Gb to install Boot Camp and Windows XP which left me 40Gb to play with. Now seeing as I had made do with a Ti PowerBook 400 before that with a measly 10Gb of space I was surprised to see that after only a couple of weeks I now only had 14Gb of space left.
I found this little App on a posting on Digg and thought I'd have a look to see where all the space was going and it actually get's pretty interesting. For a start the large red area, bottom centre of the screen, is something called sleepimg which comes in at a whopping 2Gb. I'm not sure but I guess it must have something to do with virtual memory.
Also something which isn't new to me but still amazing to see is the impact having iLife apps installed has on your machine. The are top left surrounded b y grey is all of the supporting files for Garageband (my iTunes are on a external HD). And the grey area below are the supporting files for iDVD.
You could spend hours looking through what is taking up all of that space and if you are tight on space this could really help out. Knowing that the printer drivers are taking up 1.5Gb of HD space when you only ever use your printer at home for example could help. I love this app and fully recommend you check out where all of your space has gone.
Enjoy.
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http://mijlee.com
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http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22694
You forgot to post a link. :-)
Yup sorry about that. Now added it and a link to the original Digg story so you can share the love there as well.
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http://mijlee.com
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Very nice, thanks.. Made me visually see which application occupied the largest space. I also had some old .dmg files that belonged in the trash :)
Waleed
www.waleedsgallery.biz
WhatSize ( http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/13006 ) does this without the weird colored squares.... also freeware, and I believe it's a gui on top of unix du, which is already on your system, so it's nice and light (~400 kb vs 2 mb).
This works well as well but the thing I really liked about Drive Inventory was that you can see immediately is a visual way where all of your hard disk space is going. With WhatSize you still have to drill down through directories to find the troublesome areas or folders.
I like the fact it's much lighter though, but looking at the way they operate I'm guessing they use the same Unix commands but display it differently.
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http://mijlee.com
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'm just reaching out but, if that file has 2GB then im guessing that you also have 2GB of RAM on your laptop.
that file should be a reserved disk space for dumping your entire RAM onto the harddrive, before going to sleep. that way, when you return from sleep, the system restores exactly your original state.
in windows is called hybernation. its pretty usefull for desktops too.
if you are in a real hurry and dont want to spend another 2 minutes deciding which file to save from your 100+ opened projects, just hybernate and decide later.
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always outnumbered, never outgunned
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always outnumbered, never outgunned
http://www.behance.net/mimimi
I do have 2Gb RAM so that must be what it is. So does it steal storage from the HD meaning the more RAM I have the less disk space?
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http://mijlee.com
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yup. more ram, more disk space reserved for sleep.
and of course, if you have lots of things opened, more time until it sleeps. :)
practically you wont go over 3GB ram. so its not an issue.
we're talking about home/office use, not critically undercover op.
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always outnumbered, never outgunned
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always outnumbered, never outgunned
http://www.behance.net/mimimi
I finally found out what app took the most space on my system ... (Answer: idvd at a whopping 1.4gb!)