The most elegant way to identify & analyze disk space usage in Mac OS X

Aug 25, 2010 - 9 Comments

daisydisk analyze disk space usage DaisyDisk is a beautiful application that gives you an excellent breakdown of disk space usage on your Mac’s hard drives. Using DaisyDisk is about as easy as it gets, you select the drive you want to scan, let it run, and wait a minute or two until a great looking interactive graphic is presented to you. The larger the blocks, the larger the contents combined file size. Hovering over the blocks lets you see live information on what exactly they are, and you can then right-click on the graphic to show the contents in the Finder.

With DaisyDisk I was able to identify 4.3GB of Podcasts that I haven’t listened to in about two years… that’s 4.3 precious gigabytes of my MacBook’s hard drive! Anytime I’ve cleaned up disk space on my Mac before I generally just leave the iTunes directory alone because I don’t want to delete any music, but what’s the point in keeping ancient podcasts about topics that are no longer even relevant? This is something I totally overlooked with just manual folder size inspections, but it stood out like a sore thumb in DaisyDisk. Honestly I’m a bit confused as to why Apple doesn’t integrate something like this directly into their own Disk Utility, it’s that useful, plus the interface and snappiness feels right at home in Mac OS X.

I am pleased to say that DaisyDisk has a nice comfortable home in my /Applications/Utilities/ folder and I’ll be using it again very soon for some much needed Spring Cleaning.

You can download a free demo of DaisyDisk, otherwise the retail version is $19.95 and available at DaisyDiskApp.com

Update: Check out the comments below for some similar but free suggestions from our users.

daisydisk screenshot

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Posted by: David Mendez in Utilities

9 Comments

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  1. […] OS X – October 11th, 2010 – No Comments If you’ve used a tool like DaisyDisk to analyze your Mac’s disk space usage, you may have come across a file named […]

  2. Mathias S says:

    Hi Taras!

    Just tried the demo but it crashed when i pointed it to my home-folder.

    I use one or two of the free alternatives which works fine for me but i will be happy to help you debug the problem i have, if you point me in the right direction.

    /m

  3. Hi, guys.

    I’m Taras, one of DaisyDisk Team members.
    As some of you have already noticed, there’re plenty of applications which try to solve problems of wasted disk space. Some of them are free, other cost money.

    DaisyDisk is successfully competing both and here’s why…

    First of all, user experience is our highest priority and we’ve spend literally months on improving and polishing it. Just a basic example: while “sunburst” maps of DaisyDisk and Filelight look similar at first glance side by side comparison makes the difference obvious: http://twitpic.com/af755. And that’s only static. Go to http://www.DaisyDiskapp.com and see the demo movies. It’s not just eye candy, DaisyDisk is also fun and easy to use.

    DaisyDisk users take advantage of our support team. We’re fast and responsive. No RTFMs, robo speeks or a need to register on freaky forums. You send an e-mail (of fill the feedback form on our site or just within the app), you get a reply.

    DaisyDisk is also faster (up to 50% in our tests) than many competing products. You can even try to scan Time Machine volumes and DaisyDisk will be handle it without crashing or slowing down to being totally useless.

    We encourage you to give the application a try and see how it performs against competition. See it yourself.

    And yes, feel free to ask any questions (spoiler: I don’t know who killed Laura Palmer) here or by e-mail.

    • Malte says:

      I’ve tried all the other apps and finally bought DaisyDisk.
      I really can’t stand the “there’s an app that does the same thing for free” mentality any more…
      I’m a (web)developer myself and I know that even “fun” projects cost a lot of time.
      If there’s a good app out there I just buy it…

      Btw great job you did on DaisyDisk :)

  4. hpux735 says:

    Not only that, these both are blatant copies of Filelight
    http://www.methylblue.com/filelight/

  5. Philipp says:

    Check out DiskRing (http://code.google.com/p/diskring/).
    Performs the same task and it’s free.

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