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Sizing up the hard drive
by Alan German
Is the
number of files and folders on your hard drive out of
control? Are you running short on usable disk space? If
so, it's time for a major cleanup. But, where to begin?
What you need is a disk space manager, and TreeSize Free
from Jam Software may just be your best, no-cost option.
Running the program is simple. Click on the
"Scan" menu item and select either a disk drive
or a directory. TreeSize will report on the files and
folders present in the selected directory. In particular,
it will tell you the amount of disk space being used and,
perhaps most importantly, the percentage of this space
that is in use.
For example,
the screenshot shows the current status of the dedicated
data partition on my hard drive. Clearly, the major space
hog is my "alan" folder that is taking up 4.9
GB or more than 80% of the used disk space. The next
big-ticket items are a data folder for my Thunderbird
E-mail client (8%) and one for digital photographs (3%).
Note that each folder has a drop-down arrow that will
expand the listing to show the space being taken by the
various files and/or sub-folders. So, if I want to find
out what is taking up 4.9 GB of disk space in the alan
folder, I can simply drill down through this section of
the listing to discover that a Dropbox (synchronization)
folder is using 3.5 GB, and an Alliance_02 sub-folder
inside Dropbox is taking up 2.2 GB.
Such results provide a quick overview of the files and
folders that are using the most disk space and are,
therefore, the most likely candidates for review and
action (think delete - or archive) in order to free up
some of this space.
Bottom Line:
TreeSize Free (Freeware)
Version 3.3
JAM Software GmbH
http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free
Originally published: November, 2015
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