![]() ![]() Just the other day, one of my client’s hard drives was filling up to the point that they could no longer back things up. I was also impressed with how fast it worked. One thing I really liked about it is the way it shows a graph of each file or directory in the tree view. The free version gives you an easy way to see the size of your folders and drill down to see the size of subfolders and files. One is for Windows and the other is for OS X. ![]() If you use something that is based on Unix (like OS X), you can use the “du” command to figure it out, but that isn’t very user friendly if you want to deal with things through a GUI. Unfortunately, most operating systems don’t make it very easy to figure out where your big files are. The most productive way to clean your hard drive is to figure out which files are taking up the most space and start there. You can easily spend an hour deleting hundreds of files, only to discover that you’ve freed 50 MB of space off a 200 GB hard drive. However, in the digital world, not all files are created equal. One is to go through, folder by folder, and clean out what you don’t need. There are two ways to clean out unnecessary information. No matter how big of hard drive you have, you’ll eventually be able to fill it. Of course now that is even less data that can fit on a single CD rom and many programs come on multiple DVDs now days. It seemed like a limitless amount of storage and I remember dreaming about what type of huge business you could run with that amount of storage space. There was a 540MB hard drive for sale that I found fascinating. When run as root, the application can access and size this and other locations on the drive.I remember when I first started looking at computer catalogs back in the late 80s. Compare the Spotlight Database size to the previous screenshot. OmniDiskSweeper run as root using Terminal. Spotlight-V100 folder now shows over 800MB of content where before it appeared empty. Once an administrative password is entered, the application will launch and allow you to scan the drive for all files. Assuming you have OmniDiskSweeper installed in your main Applications folder, that command is: sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper As with all sudo commands, triple-check the syntax before executing it (or simply copy/paste from here) as it is possible to cause irreversible damage to the OS and file system if the wrong command is entered. To give OmniDiskSweeper full access to all files on your drive, you must run the application from the Terminal using the sudo command, which stands for “Super User Do” and gives access to all files on a user’s drive. Since few people ever run as a fully priviledged “root” user, this means you’re almost always going to miss something, including system-level files or files and folders belonging to other user accounts on that Mac. When run normally, as above, Joe noted that OmniDiskSweeper only shows files that are visible to the user that ran it. Note also the size of the Spotlight Database as 0 bytes. It shows that the user’s Documents folder is the largest folder on the drive. OmniDiskSweeper run from the Applications folder. Thankfully he also found a solution which he shared with us and we now share with you. ![]() This allows a user to easily find the largest files on a drive and is great for clearing up free space (such as when preparing to migrate to a smaller solid state drive). However, in Mac Geek Gab 355, listener Joe found that it doesn’t always show everything. OmniDiskSweeper scans the files and folders of your Mac’s hard drive and displays a list, in order of file size, of the contents of your drive. Long time Mac Geek Gab listeners know that using OmniDiskSweeper is a fantastic (free!) way to find out what files are taking up all your precious hard drive or SSD space. ![]()
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