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