Hunt Down for Bulky Files/Folders on your Harddisk to Free Disk Space using TreeSize Free
Have you ever been in a situation where your harddisk is completely filled out and you are running out of space but can’t figure out that where this space is being used? If yes then you know that how difficult and cumbersome it can be to locate and hunt down all the culprit files that are taking the most space so that needless or less important files can be removed. It may happen particularly to people in the habit of making collections of things like movies, music videos, software etc. It is understandable that the trend of rapid increase in harddisk capacities in recent years has more or less mitigated this effect but nevertheless there is never something like enough space because as the haddisk capacities grow so does our requirements.
There are two ways when hunting down the files/folders that are gobbling all the precious space on your harddisk, one is a manual hunt down and the other method is to use a third-party system utility to locate bulky files/folders. Of course the second approach is more convenient and this is what I will recommend.
For the past couple of months I am using a nice free utility from Jam Software called Tree Size Free (a Pro version is also available if you have some money to burn) that allows you to locate the files and folders that are taking the most space in a complete system drive or a particular folder. After installation it integrates itself nicely in the windows shell and can be called by right clicking on any folder and selecting the TreeSize Free from the context menu. TreeSize will open in a new window and present all the files and folders in a tree like view with the sizes of the respective folders (hence the name of the utility). By default all the folders are sorted on size (descending order) so you can quickly locate the folders that are occupying the most space in a specific location. You can directly delete the folders from this interface(to free disk space) or click on the explore button to open them in windows explorer. Aside from this basic functionality it supports some other useful features mentioned below:
- Folders in a tree can be sorted on size, allocated space, percent (percent size of the folder as compared to the parent folder), CD/DVD cluster size and file count.
- Space consumption units can be modified from KB to MB or GB
- You can also filter on a specific extension type(wild card) and only those file types will be considered in space computation
Newer version woks in multiple threads and is pretty fast in scanning the folders for size calculations. Also the size stats update in real time in TreeSize window as it continues scanning in the background.
As for me, I use this utility on almost regular basis as it saves me time to manually hunt down the bulky files/folders in complex folder structures. If for some reason you don’t like it there is always the option of the popular Folder Size which integrates itself in windows shell and adds a folder size column in detailed view of Windows file explorer. However I don’t like to switch my folder view in Windows explorer to detailed view(from tile view etc.) just to use this feature. Also its scanning speed is somewhat slower as compared to TreeSize in my experience. YMMV.
You can download the latest version of TreeSize Free from the official website here.
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Tags: files, folders, freespace, harddisk, size, Software, tree, WindowsRelated posts
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Dirlot http://soft.km.ua/soft/dirlot/index.en.html does much the same and has perhaps the least size among similar utilities.