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Easy visualization with Daisy Disk

by Megan Lavey-Heaton Jul 14th 2009 at 8:00AM


Daisy Disk is the perfect example of one of those tools that should be built right into OS X.

It's the latest in disk visualization utilities -- software that scans your hard drive and lets you know which files are being hard drive hogs (in my case, World of Warcraft - no big surprise there). But, it's the added features that turn this from basic to "wow, why didn't Apple develop something like this?"

Once you initiate the software, you'll see a list of mounted drives on your network that you can scan. I scanned my main drive. It took less than four minutes for it to go through the 120GB drive and display everything in a circular graphic that does remind you of a daisy wheel.

Each section of your drive is color-coded for its specific purpose. The closest parts to the center of the graphic are the root levels. Going further out will net you very specific details on file sizes. Clicking on one section move it to the forefront and let you see everything on that level. When you get down to the files themselves, tap the space bar to preview the file. Then, right click to expose those files in the Finder, then do what you wish with them. Then, click on the inner circle to go back out to the level above. For smaller files and folders, it's better to use the list on the side rather than try to pick things out of the wheel.

Doing this enabled me to find large files that I hadn't seen in years, including a folder of old backups from 2006 that got carried over from my iBook. Deleting those netted me 7GB of space. The only feature really not working properly is the preview portion. When I tried playing .M4V video sources, I was rewarded with a grey screen. Regular .AVIs were fine.

DaisyDisk costs $19.95USD and requires OS X 10.5 or higher. You can do a full-featured download for free, which gives you a great taste of what it has to offer. For those wanting the same sort of tools, but for free, give OmniDiskSweeper or GrandPerspective a try.



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Daisy Disk is the perfect example of one of those tools that should be built right into OS X. It's the latest in disk visualization...
 

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Kanny96

$0 solution :

Put this in your ~/.bash_profile :

duk() {
du -k "$@" | grep -v "$*/.*/" | sort -rn | sed -E '1s|$|/|; s|([[:space:]]).*/|1|;'
}


Then, in Terminal, just type :

duk a_folder_path


It will give you the same info, but much faster.

July 17 2009 at 10:01 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Kanny96's comment
Kanny96

Editor f*ked up the code. The following should be in one line:

du -k "$@" | grep -v "$*/.*/" | sort -rn | sed -E '1s|$|/|; s|([[:space:]]).*/|1|;'

July 17 2009 at 10:05 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Allister

The humble pie chart relies on area, not angle, to portray its proportions. A well know 'cheat' for pie charts is to offset the centre, which hardy alters the angles but significantly affects the area if done cleverly. The sunburst chart removes the area measure relies instead on angles. Then, because of tree depth, a file of size X at some level down the tree is displayed physically smaller than another file of the same size deeper in the tree. The area and lineal size differ merely because files are at different levels of the tree. Therefore the instant impression of size is only of use within a single level of the tree. Given different parts of the tree will run to different depths, this makes the comparison really only useful within a single directory.

In a rectangular treemap diagram, the biggest area is the biggest file, no matter how deep in the tree it is. If you see two boxes of equivalent size, then they are of equivalent file size no matter where they are located.

In my experience with DIX, I have no difficulty identifying the areas of my disk with a quick hover - and also because I can quickly see large collections of MP3s videos and know I'm looking at my iTunes directory for example. But in any case a quick hover with the mouse soon shows me the paths and the roving highlight of the top level directories helps to visually bound the sections.

Yes, we could argue the merits of treemap versus sunburst until the ends of the earth, but the fact is that DIX works. It has done for years. No amount of 'ours is better' will change that.

July 16 2009 at 6:16 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Allister's comment
Oleg Krupnov (DaisyDisk Team)

Allister, we appreciate your thoughtful criticism. Your arguments are perfectly valid, and they came to our minds too when we designed DaisyDisk, and we considered them. Rectangular areas on tree-maps also happen to be difficult to visually compare, consider two blocks equal by area but one of them is oblong and the other is nearly equilateral. Out of all pros and contras, we tried to strike the optimal balance and worked around problems. And BTW we are still refining our sunburst, in particular, experimenting with ring widths, to account on the area distortion effect that you mentioned.

We are aware that for some people rectangular tree maps will still be the preferred way, and we are not trying to change this. DIX is a great app, and has been so for years, and it's free! ;) So if you like it more, no problem! :)

July 17 2009 at 12:58 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Sean Su

Shouldn't this software be free or much cheaper than $19.95? I've been using Steffen Gerlach's Scanner for Windows since 2000 (yes it's 9 years old!) and it is identical to this software.

You would think there would be a free Mac equivalent which also uses the far more intuitive wheel visual.

Also the gradient box for my Macs and Windows machines look hideous. It's not intuitive at all.

July 16 2009 at 5:14 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Allister

Like many here, I will stick with Disk Inventory X. To me the difference is this. The sunburst method shows me the biggest folders and then the biggest folders within those and so on. *Down* the tree. The rectangular approach of DIX shows me the largest *files* and I can then quickly infer (via mouseover) where they are, moving *up* the tree. In the rectangular world, human judgement of area is far simpler than with complex curves. IMHO of course.

July 15 2009 at 3:47 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
3 replies to Allister's comment
bangler

I wish the Mac port of KDE's FileLight (http://freshmeat.net/projects/macfilelight/) was still active… The wheel motif is so much nicer than something like Grand Inventory, but I can't really spring $20 on this right now…

July 15 2009 at 9:57 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to bangler's comment
bangler

Grand Inventory? I meant Grand Perspective. Or Disk Inventory X. They're both of the hideous-gradient-box genre.

July 15 2009 at 9:59 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
joe

Whoa. I'm a huge advocate of free and open source software, but this program is _almost_ good enough for me to drop the cash on. Its quite fast and truly beautiful. Even if you've got no desire to drop the cash on it, try the demo! I can see what Megan meant when she said it should be built in to OS X.

BUT...
As pretty as it is, and as well-implemented as the zooming is, that style of graph is not (by a long shot) the best visualization. Pie charts alone are bad enough (see Tufte's comments for a start), but this takes what's wrong with pie charts and makes it even worse (less practical).

Oleg, if you're still reading these comments: please, I beg you, if you can add a bar chart or treemap visualization, and make it as slick as this one, this product will be SO AWESOME.

July 15 2009 at 2:17 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
3 replies to joe's comment
Justin

Very slick!

Though for the more OCD, like myself, about what's on their machine, WhatSize takes the cake:

http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize

July 14 2009 at 6:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Frank Ewell

I tried one of the free programs; OmniDiskSweeper. and found a 26 gig file in application support. The application "iSwipe" and it's huge support files no-longer reside on my computer. THX

July 14 2009 at 4:11 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
The Iron Giant

The wheel/pie idea has been done before:

JDiskReport
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/

July 14 2009 at 12:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to The Iron Giant's comment
Taras Brizitsky

Iron Giant, no one tells the idea is unique. Even more, I can name you lots of applications which use sunburst for different purposes. Furthermore, there're lots of interesting research papers on this topic…

What's unique in DaisyDisk is implementation. We've tried to take the best from all applications of that kind and add results of our own researches as well. As result, in practice DaisyDisk is way easier to use and much more visual than Filelight which looks really similar to our application in static.

Taras Brizitsky, ux specialist. DaisyDisk Team.

July 14 2009 at 1:11 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
blusuedeshoes215

Well, yes, Pie charts have been done before- Windows itself will give you a pie chart of how much space is full or empty in a hard drive. The map in this program is not a Pie, however, and gives more information than the pie graph in your example does.

I really like this app. I've downloaded the demo and am messing with it- I'd love to see this as a widget on the desktop as I think it'd be an interesting way to navigate my hard drive in general, especially if you can find a more interesting, intuitive way of displaying directory/filenames than a list on the side. It'd be a lot of fun to build a desktop around such a widget.

Unfortunately, I can't really justify $20 for such a tool- as other people have said, there are already free competitors out there who get the job done, albeit not as elegantly. If you were to make this into donationware, or even just lower the price a bit (I understand if you believe this is not feasible), I think you'd see a sharp uptick in sales. A lot of mac users I know, myself included, do actually donate to donationware if they like the product, but there's a pricing threshold a lot of us don't like to pass for utilities such as this, and I think $20 is across that line.

July 14 2009 at 1:52 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Paul Avery

I will admit that your app is visually appealing. But, personally, I cannot justify $20 for an app which does the exact same thing that another free one (DiskInventoryX) does. I have used it for years. And honestly, I do find the generated map just as, if not more, helpful in DiskInventoryX.

I don't include speed in my mind because what is 10 seconds when scanning a whole hard disk? Absolutely nothing!

July 14 2009 at 11:46 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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