TUAW's Daily Mac App: Disk Inventory X
With Lion on the way, maybe it's time to give your Mac a bit of spring cleaning. The best place to start is always the hard drive, and Disk Inventory X is a great tool.
You let Disk Inventory X scan your hard drive and it creates a visual representation of the used file space on your disk called a treemap. Each of the colored blocks represents a file on your hard drive. They're color-coded by file type, allowing you to visually distinguish documents from media files, applications from fonts. The size of each of the blocks is proportional to its file size, meaning that the bigger the file is the larger the block, which allows you to quickly identify large space hogs.
The large purple square in the image above represents the sparse bundle used by FileVault, but you can easily see the digital copies of Inception, Star Trek and Tron Legacy I have stored in iTunes outside the FileVault. Once you've identified an errant large file, click on the block to display information about the file including size, creation and modification date, owner, permissions, file path and format. You can then either reveal the file in Finder or trash it straight from Disk Inventory X.
While you can find large files manually with Finder, Disk Inventory X streamlines the process. Download the free Disk Inventory X today and reclaim some of that valuable hard drive.
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With Lion on the way, maybe it's time to give your Mac a bit of spring cleaning. The best place to start is always the hard drive, and...
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It doesn't work with Lion. Does anyone know if they are working on an application that will work with Lion? I have been using Disc Inventory for a while and it has really come in handy!
July 22 2011 at 5:13 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyPlease do not forget WhatSize.
http://www.whatsizemac.com/
I can size files and duplicates owned by root or other users of the machine.
Ideal when your mac is shared by a few family members.
Disk Inventory X is a great app (I've been using it for years).
Another app that I like even more is Space Gremlin (strange name but an excellent app and only $3.99 at the Apple App Store).
Grand Perspective is much better and does the same thing.
July 08 2011 at 5:39 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyDIX (lul) is legacy software at this point. don't get me wrong, i loved it too, but "DaisyDisk" on the MAS is beautiful, fast and brilliant
July 08 2011 at 4:22 PM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down ReplyIf I'm not mistaken, Disk Inventory X requires Rosetta which is no longer supported in Lion.
July 08 2011 at 3:54 PM Report abuse Permalink +2 rate up rate down ReplyThere seems to be a UB beta of DIX:
http://www.derlien.com/dixforum/viewtopic.php?t=62
Anyway, there are better options available nowadays.
How does this compare with Disk Inspector in the Mac App Store?
July 08 2011 at 3:53 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI agree with Niko, DaisyDisk is definitely the best option for this.
July 08 2011 at 3:23 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI personally can't stand either this or Grand Perspective, treemaps must be one of the least understandable methods for working out disk usage.
Not to mention it's as graceful as a flying brick, looks like it was ported from Linux or Windows c. 1996.
By this, I mean Disk Inventory X (the X means "recently made for that new System 10 Apple's doing now, just came out of beta I think")
July 08 2011 at 3:39 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate downBy this, I mean Disk Inventory X (the X means "recently made for that new System 10 Apple's doing now, just came out of beta I think")
July 08 2011 at 3:39 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate downDisk Inventory X and GrandPerspective are ok but if you want something that has a much nicer interface try DaisyDisk http://www.daisydiskapp.com/. It's not free but it's worth it in addition to visualizing the data stored on your hard disk, it also lets you preview files and delete unwanted files right from the app.
July 08 2011 at 3:20 PM Report abuse Permalink +2 rate up rate down ReplyAnd it compares the amount of disk space you saved to something obscure like the space on the original iPod haha
July 08 2011 at 3:24 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Replyit looks like DaisyDisk is 50% off @ $9.99 in the AppStore... I've used Disk Inventory X for a few years but DaisyDisk looks promising.
July 11 2011 at 2:17 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyGrandPerspective is another app that does the same thing but is more actively developed: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/
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