Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Know about your hard disk stats using "WinDirStat"

WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for various versions of Microsoft Windows.

Note: if you are looking for an alternative for Linux, you are looking for KDirStat (apt-get install kdirstat on Debian-derivatives) and for MacOS X it would be Disk Inventory X or GrandPerspective.

Please visit the WinDirStat blog for more up-to-date information about the program.
On start up, it reads the whole directory tree once and then presents it in three useful views:

  • The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,
  • The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,
  • The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types

The treemap represents each file as a colored rectangle, the area of which is proportional to the file's size. The rectangles are arranged in such a way, that directories again make up rectangles, which contain all their files and subdirectories. So their area is proportional to the size of the subtrees. The color of a rectangle indicates the type of the file, as shown in the extension list. The cushion shading additionally brings out the directory structure.



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