Where Did My Hard Drive Space Go?

Posted on: June 27th, 2009

These days hard drive space is very cheap and many people have way bigger hard drives that they every utilize. However, once in a while this question comes up. I found two really neat little software that can answer your question.

The first one is called Space Monger. It’s a free software & it can be downloaded from most of the main download websites. Here’s one of them: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/spacemonger.html

With this you can scan your hard drive (or external hard drive, CD, etc) and get a visual representation of the hard drive space. Needless to say, it’s best done on a high resolution display setting.

Here’s a screenshot of a hard drive I worked on and freed up over 10GB of hard drive space (click on the picture to enlarge it.

As you can see the person had a quite big music collection taking up a good portion of the overall space. You can also zoom into folders that seem to occupy too much space and get a detailed view on what’s inside that folder.

A word of caution: If you don’t know what it is, don’t delete it! You can seriously mess up a computer if you delete the wrong things. To be safe stay inside the

A tip: Use Ccleaner before you run SpaceMonger. That will eliminate the temporary files so you’ll have a clearer view on what’s taking up the space.

Tip #2: If you see that a folder in a the Program Files folder is taking up too much space and you are not using the program then instead of deleting the folder go and uninstall the software using either Windows’ uninstall process, or Ccleaner. Removing the folders of a program creates a lot of broken links in the system and might result in some really weird behavior.

Note on Vista usage: You might need to run SpaceMonger as an Administrator in order to get an accurate picture of hard drive usage (by right clicking on the spacemonger icon and selecting Run As Administrator). Vista has a lot more built-in stops that prevents programs accessing certain files and folders. Running it as an administrator will allow SpaceMonger to check the content of more folders. But again, be very, very careful on what you delete!

The second one is a more modern software and probably works better with Vista. It’s called TreeSize and is also a free software (it has more advanced versions for some bucks). The free version’s download link is: http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/TreeSizeSetup.exe

It’s concept is quite similar to space monger’s and but instead of an area map, you’ll get a tree like structure which show you which folders take up how much space. You can also look for folders with unusually high number of files – if you have the game “Sims” installed you’ll be suprised on the file count of that software. Large number of small files can really slow down searches and virus scans.

Another neat feature of this software is that it can generate a printed report for you, if you want to analyze it later. It also integrates with Windows Explorer so when you are looking at a folder and right-click on it then you’ll have an option to run a size analysis on just that folder.

Here’s a screenshot of this software:

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