TUAW's Daily Mac App: DaisyDisk

Trying to find space hogs on your various disks can be a nightmare. DaisyDisk makes it easier by letting you visualize your hard drives with beautiful circular sunburst maps.

There are quite a few disk space visualizers out there, Disk Inventory X, which we featured recently on the Daily Mac App recently, is a good example that uses classic treemaps to display your data. DaisyDisk, which we reviewed in March, uses a variation on the theme, by representing you disks as circular interactive maps.

Zoomed out you see the whole disk at once, from there you can identify any large folders that likely harbor space wasting files. Clicking on one of the folders from the side menu or directly on the map will then take you into that folder and give you another map of the data this time just in that folder. You can quickly drill down and find large files, with gorgeous looking and well animated maps generated each time you click through.

Once you've identified a possible candidate for deletion, you can use Quick Look to check out the file by hovering over it and hitting the space bar. If you think it's a file you can do without, you can delete it right from DaisyDisk by hitting delete or dragging it to the target in the lower right-hand corner.

DaisyDisk is simple to use, scans your disks really fast and makes hunting for junk files quick, easy and fun. It's an incredibly slick program that's a must-have if you're doing a serious clear out.

DaisyDisk is available for US$19.95 from the developers site and will run on Leopard and up, or is currently on sale for half price at $9.99 in the Mac App Store.

Thanks to Niko JP 12 for the suggestion.