OmniDiskSweeper
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Mac 101: Six steps for tracking down hard drive space hogs
More Mac 101, our ongoing series of tips, tricks and helpful hints for new Mac users and curious veterans. "Your startup disk is almost full." This simple sentence can trigger all the stages of grief: denial ("That can't be right!"), anger ("This is a 500 GB drive!"), bargaining ("If I delete the podcasts, will you let me download the new iOS update?"), depression ("Ugh, this is going to take all day. Am I going to have to replace my hard drive?") and acceptance ("I can fix this!"). Before you rush out to buy a new hard drive, here are six simple (and free) steps that may help you reclaim "lost" hard drive space.
Friday Favorite: OmniDiskSweeper helps you track down where all your disk space went
"Where did all my disk space all go?" When I was in college, each student was allotted 4 megabytes ('mega' is not a typo) of disk space for both email and files. Granted, this was back in the early '90s, before anyone had heard of "www." or had even thought of ".mp3" or ".mp4". In 1995 I acquired a 1GB hard drive and felt like king of the known world. Sure, it was in a case about the size of a loaf of bread, but an entire gigabyte! All to myself! Today I have a Drobo which is in a case roughly the same size as that 1GB drive, but it has 2 terabytes of redundant storage -- 2,000x the space on that prime example of mid-90s storage tech. One thing hasn't changed: there's still never enough hard drive space. It seems to be as unavoidable as death and taxes. That Drobo? It's about 95% full. Enter OmniDiskSweeper, a freeware program by The Omni Group which will allow you to find where your diskspace has gone. Now, there are a number of different programs out there for analyzing your hard drive space: DiskInventoryX, GrandPerspective, Baseline, DaisyDisk, and WhatSize, to name just a few. Choosing one may be as personal as which Twitter client or web browser you prefer. I like OmniDiskSweeper for two reasons: it is free and it is simple. It uses the same "Column View" that I use in Finder, and automatically sorts the folders which use the most disk space to the top. For example, looking at the Drobo, I can see that about 50% of the space on that device is taken up by programs I have recorded using Elgato's EyeTV. You might also find files in unexpected places. A friend recently used OmniDiskSweeper and realized that he had tried to copy a bunch of files to an external hard drive, but something had gone wrong. Instead of moving the files to the external drive, they had just been moved into a folder in /Volumes/. OmniDiskSweeper makes it easy to delete files right through the app; simply select the file and click the big red "Delete" button. A word of warning! A warning dialogue box will appear, asking you to confirm that you want to "Destroy" the files. They will not be sent to the Trash (since the assumption is that you are running OmniDiskSweeper because you want to reclaim diskspace), they will be deleted immediately. The Omni Group made OmniDiskSweeper (along with several other utilities) free a few months ago, so if you looked at it and were turned off by a price tag, give it another look. It may not have as many bells and whistles as some of the other programs out there, but it's hard to beat OmniDiskSweeper for ease of use. UPDATE: TUAW reader "ithinkergoimac" comments below that OmniDiskSweeper may report incorrect (significantly increased) file sizes if you are using TimeMachine.
Easy visualization with Daisy Disk
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.
OmniGroup makes several apps freeware
OmniGroup has announced that they have decided to release several of their previously shareware applications as freeware. These are: OmniWeb, one of the first Mac web browsers with roots going back beyond even OS X; OmniDazzle, a fun screen effects application, potentially useful for presentations and screencasts; OmniDiskSweeper, a very useful utility for getting a handle on large files taking up disk space; and OmniObjectMeter, a developer tool for optimizing memory usage in OS X application development.Apparently the reason behind the decision is simply that Omni wants to focus more on their other applications and these four were not worthy of as much attention. They don't rule out future updates, but it doesn't really look that likely. For my own part, I can't help but think that OmniWeb's day has passed, but OmniDazzle and OmniDiskSweeper are still useful tools (not being a developer I don't have much to say about OmniObjectMeter). In any case, it's a nice gesture to the Mac community from one of its older members.All four applications are free downloads from their respective pages: OmniWeb, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, OmniObjectMeter.[via Daring Fireball]
Omnigroup releases free Intel updates
Hot on the heels of yesterday's announcements, The Omnigroup has released free universal binary updates for registered users of the majority of their applications, including OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniDiskSweeper, OmniObjectMeter and OmniDictionary. These will all run natively on the new Intel-based iMac and the MacBook Pro. Grab your copies now for that sweet new MacBook Pro you just ordered.
