What are Reddit's favorite Disk Usage Analyzer Apps?

WinDirStat. Best application ever for cleaning up your harddrives. It gives you a graphical represenation of how much space each and every file takes up and makes it easy for you to delete them or entire catalogue structures. Makes it easy to find huge moviefiles you've forgotten in a folder somewhere or a catalogue of thousands of small cashe files made by some application like Adobe Premiere or whatever.

I use WinDirStat, it's an open source tool to find large file blobs on your computer.

It takes a while to scan, but I can find stuff with it that no other tool would have found, like a large chunk of rotten pizza below a pillow, with the name "Ubuntu 12.vdi" written on it.

Edit: WinDirStat > TreeSize

get the program WinDirStat there are others like it but this is the one i like

My guess windows updated and you have a windows.old that is large. (this is to recover in case the update broke)

Let me change your life friend. This is WinDirStat Give it a couple minutes and it sizes up all of your used disk space, both graphically and with folders that are measured in percentage.

> "Clinton special."

The IT team for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used the open source cleaning software BleachBit to wipe systems "so even God couldn’t read them," according to South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy on Fox News. His comments on the "drastic cyber-measure" were in response to the question of whether her emails were simply about "yoga and wedding plans."

It's probably one game going out of control. Mine personally is 50mb for the whole thing.

I agree that you generally shouldn't poke in there, but in this case, I recommend running something like WinDirStat to find what game is using so much space. One you know the folder, go to:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/<appid>/

To see what game it is.

Here’s the windirstat download /u/testicular_prolapse (great name) if you don’t know what the above comment is talking about. You can download it and run it on your drive to get a graphical representation of files on your machine, like this. Super useful if you’re running out of space on your drive and don’t know where it is. The bigger the box, the bigger the file, and if you click on boxes it’ll tell you where/what the file is. Feel free to DM me if you need any help running it - it’s a very useful program

Edit: also agreed with the above comment that you should definitely not be completely out of space when removing everything but bare essentials. Even a basic laptop with a 128GB SSD should have good wiggle room. I one time found a 250GB corrupt video file when using windirstat, so it’s not unheard of

For those who want a replacement for CCleaner, use Bleachbit. Open source and does what CCleaner does.

EDIT: One bit of information. If your files are on a SSD, you do not need overwrite the files to truly delete them. TRIM will actually delete the data

I've been using CCleaner since the early 2000's when it was called Crap Cleaner. Haven't updated in a few years because, why would I? The version I had did what it should. I've always been happy with it.

Then this news came along. Sure my version still works, but I no longer trust them. This after more than a decade of being a loyal user. Funny how one bit of news can sever the relationship but that's just how I feel about it.

So I've moved onto BleachBit. It's open source with pretty regular commits and works on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X).

Sorry, Piriform.

Bleachbit actually made their own microfibre cloth printed with HRC's face during the famous presser. I bought a handful of these during the campaign and added it to my memorabilia. See image below.

https://www.bleachbit.org/images/cloth_or_something3.jpg

If all you want to do is test the drive to make sure it's ok plug it into your uncle's as a secondary drive and run some benchmarks on it, Passmark will test performance and CrystalDiskInfo will check for errors.

Use Windirstat (https://windirstat.net/) to check the size of folders and files.

You may also want to do a clean up system files: right click C:, properties and click "Disk Clean-up". There you click the button in the lower left, "Clean up system files". There may be an old installation of windows hanging about after an upgrade (they're deleted after 30 days or something)

> Meuller’s indictments of 12 Russian intelligence agents prove that the Kremlin stole the election for Trump

Accusations as proof? This soviet-style propaganda would be funny if it weren't so sad...

Here, something to cheer us all up: https://www.bleachbit.org/cloth-or-something

I'd recommend installing https://windirstat.net/ and removing files you can from the C Drive.

This program will help visualize the space used on your HDD.

Depending on if you use the Hibernate function that can remove a good chunk of GB from your HDD by deleting it.

Follow the Step by steps here: https://www.nextofwindows.com/what-is-hiberfilsys-and-how-to-delete-in-windows-7-free-up-hard-drive-space

I had done this for an upgrade to Windows 10 on my brothers PC and it can squeeze that bit of space you need.

WinDirStat is a program that calculates a visualization of every file on a disk. Files that are larger in size are represented by a larger square. The files are also colored based upon their type.

I'm a fan of GrandPerspective: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

You point it at a target drive or folder, it scans it, and gives you a visual representation of what's taking up space. There are a few applications around which do more or less the same thing, but I've found this one pretty decent and it's free if you download it from their website.

Take off the bottom panel and use a can of compressed air to clean the fans. Keep your C-drive from filling up, defrag your HDDs sometimes, (SSDs typically don't need to be defrag'd) pay attention to your CPU/GPU temperatures and repaste (or have someone else do it) if you start to see a big change in how your computer performs and the temps your seeing.

WinDirStat is an awesome program for keeping your hard drive from getting too cluttered.

Windows also has a built-in maintenance tool called Disk Clean-up that I use every once in a while to delete unnecessary clutter

Daisy Disk is a perfect app for nailing down exactly what’s eating up space. It also shows the data in a really nice pie chart so it’s easy to understand and visualize. Pretty sure there’s a fully functioning free trial available on their website but at $10 it’s worth it to keep around and use anytime you’re low on space.

I use it all the time since my editing programs can scatter large cache files around or a folder has much larger files stored in it than I realized.

Oh, sure, that's true. Some are more partisan than others and may conveniently disregard untruths by their preferred candidate, or go more aggressively against the other one.

That still doesn't really help Trump though, given that the overwhelming majority of fact checkers all say that he made far more false statements than Clinton did, so either they're pretty much ALL heavily biased towards her, or... he just lies a lot more.

I checked up on the MSNBC acid wash one you suggested and, well, it's a technicality.

Did Clinton erase the emails? Yes.

Did she use a process called "Acid washing"? No, that is a meaningless and made up term. It's not a thing in I.T.

So technically they're correct, but they really should have elaborated to point that out more clearly. They did at least mention that she used BleachBit, which is a tool used to erase data off computers, but they really should have been more specific. Their mentioning that does at least show that they weren't entirely trying to cover up the fact that she deleted the emails.

Edits: Added a couple lines for clarification.

Another edit: Actually, while I'm on this "acid wash" one, Trump keeps talking about what an expensive process that was and how much it cost taxpayers. In fact, BleachBit is free software.

http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net This app is free, and it gives you a graphic representation of every file and folder on your Mac. Large files are large squares and large folders are large sections of squares. While hovering over a square, the app shows you the complete file path to it.

Download WinDirStat and use it every couple months to clean out the garbage you don't need. Been a live saver for me since I run purely SSD storage on my rig. Disabling hibernate also saves quite a bit of room as well.

Download this free program and you tell us how it happened: https://windirstat.net/

Running this program can help get rid of junk and cached files: https://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER

Often it is excess cached data in the %appdata% folder from Google and Microsoft.

WinDirStat to the rescue!

On linux, ncdu is basically the command line version of this.

Edit: It's strange that the professional version of TreeSize doesn't work for you, I've never used it but based on the name, TreeSize sounds like it has one goal in life: give you the size of directory trees. Having it not work is a grade A failure (considering how simple it is to determine a folder's size, any coder could code up something that does this in a few minutes).

https://www.bleachbit.org/cloth-or-something

Bonus: How to Delete Secret Emails from Microsoft Exchange Server

Everything about them.

She was supposed to turn over all work-related emails, but there was no need to turn over non-work-related ones.

So how does she go about doing this?

She literally prints tens of thousands of emails and sends them on paper (!), making it a whole fucking lot harder to go through them. They have to be manually scanned and categorised. This also made searching them more difficult, because you are searching hand-scanned PDF files instead of plain digital text.

Then she SAYS these are ALL the work-related ones.

Maybe someone wanted to check if that was the case? Maybe there was a danger there were sensitive work-related emails she hadn't turned over?

Nope, after printing off and sending the mountains of documents she claimed were all the relevant ones, she DELETED all her emails and used software to PREVENT DATA RECOVERY - "Bleachbit".

In retrospect it was discovered there were a bunch of emails that WERE work related but she deleted. They were recovered through other means.

She got classified information sent to a shitty home-setup server in her basement. It would have been a prime hacking target by pretty much everyone in the world - and they would have the IP address each time she emailed from it (the recipient sees the sending IP). That's like storing classified information in a shitty home-built shack, and sending the address of it to every foreign government.

She also tried to get around restrictions on sending classified information by stripping out the part that says CLASSIFIED so that people wouldn't react to it being sent by regular fax. You are not supposed to send classified information by regular fax.

This is just Hillary's emails. The DNC emails contain a whole lot more shit.

For just clearing out space, I highly suggest something like WinDirStat. It gives you a handy visualization of your hard drive to let you see what is taking up space where.

I also like to use one of the many duplicate file finding programs out there to clean up duplicate images and the like.

WinDirStat is handy to see what all is on your drive. For those who like pictures and graphs, it's very effective. It's a great product that I use quite often, especially when I need to figure out what is taking up so much damned space!

He has such a nice smile in that picture. A genuinely happy man.

When I saw this, I knew he had, without any further doubt, won. However, it was when Florida, and then Pennsylvania went red, I had a massive grin on my face and was like 'Holy shit, they actually did it!'

As for things that trigger SJW's, how about this?

He still doesnt understand what bleachbit is. Frankly Clinton would have been stupid not to use some sort of delete tool to delete any files she had on her computer. As SOS she would have been intimately aware of how stuff that gets thrown in the trash on a computer can be recovered.

Funny how they were praising him just some months ago, isn't it?

Lets wipe the whole fucking lot of them with a Cloth or Something.

These dumbarses are going to be crying on November 9th when Trump wins.

I'd like to point out that while the quote there is speculative, the speculative aspect was regarding motivation. BleachBit probably believes they were used because South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy went on Fox News and used that name specifically, and three times in twenty seconds. Here it is, queue'd up.

He's a former prosecutor, he was the lead of the House's special select committee to investigate Benghazi, a few other qualifications. I get why you thought this whole thing was just a marketing ploy (because it totally is a marketing ploy, and more power to 'em) but they likely didn't just insert themselves into the discussion, and since the examiner did link BleachBit's post on the issue I imagine they at least watched the relevant half-minute of the Rep's interview.

“Other” is just everything not in the other categories. It could just as well be named “Everything else”. Install GrandPerspective to find out what’s using that space.

http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net

iStat Menus Paid

It's an amazing little app that shows you CPU usage, RAM usage, etc... almost any stat you want, in your menu bar. I've installed it on every Mac I've ever had.

Allow me to introduce you to one of my favorite tools for Windows.

https://windirstat.net/

This download is 100% safe, but you can google it if you're unsure. Here's the Wikipedia page for it.

This program will create a visual, interactive representation of the contents of your hard drive. To put it simply, the larger the squares, the larger the corresponding file is. You can move your mouse over the square to read what the file itself is, and you can even right click on the square and open the file in Explorer to delete it/double-check it.

Give it a go, let me know if you have any questions. This should give you a great idea of what's taking up the most space in your drive.

Download the app DaisyDisk. The free demo is all you need, full featured, and will let you scan and visualize all the data on the hard drive. You can then easily hunt down the files eating up the space and delete them!

See: https://daisydiskapp.com

If it works for you, pick up a license to support the dev, it's on sale for $5 for Black Friday :)

Try a utility like DaisyDisk or if you're handy in Terminal you can probably figure out what's using all of your disk space with the 'du' command

From the BleachBit website-

With BleachBit you can free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there.... Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster." Link

As the aforementioned thread points out, there are a great number of tools to figure out what is on your drive. I really like Grand Perspective. Find forgotten virtual machines, movies, games, etc.

The link doesn't mention that for casual Mac users, the huge "others" tend to be backups that have accumulated over time, sometimes from their iOS devices, sometimes from TimeMachine being left on but the backup drive never being plugged in so the file changes can be flushed off to the backup disk. At least, this is my anecdotal experience when supporting my luddite SO's and families' Macs.

I would recommend Daisy Disk.

For me, it help find a bunch items that were just hidden/buried on my Macbook.

Back a few years ago I had to install Skype for a meeting. Deleted it afterwards but then found a 5gb folder hidden somewhere in my computer with Skype emojis. The app has been fantastic for file management and find caches that build up too high.

It is $10 though. I thought I purchased it at $5 years ago but I personally think it's worth it and could help.

Use Disk Inventory X (free) if you want to see where your storage has gone to.

Or if you want a more up to date UI, use DaisyDisk ($9.99) but Disk Inventory X still does the job.

I would suggest running diagnostics before spending money on anything.

For RAM: https://www.memtest86.com/ For storage (HDD): https://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

If you are lucky, you will get some errors/warnings on one of those. However, it is possible for diagnostics to miss an error in your hardware. So if the memory test comes up clean, that does not necessarily mean the RAM is not the issue.

Vjerojatno imaš gomilu nepotrebnih stvari na sistemskom disku. Ovo je iznimno korisna stvarčica - analiziraj C i vidjet ćeš što točno zauzima prostor, pa lagano kreni čistiti.

WinDirStat is a program that calculates a visualization of every file on a disk. Files that are larger in size are represented by a larger square. The files are also colored based upon their type.

> And you can use the portable version of CCleaner which doesn't install anything

Or even better, don't support them and their scummy practices in any way and use BleachBit instead

It's normal for a program to allocate space before it begins writing information. This is to prevent the end user from filling that space before the operation is complete. In the case of ESO this is particularly inconvenient because it is a very large game. If you do not have enough disk space and do not want to remove anything from your current disk then yes, you will have to buy a new drive. You can normally get 120GB SSDs for around $40-$60 on sale, I would suggest going that route as it's fairly cost effective and will help boost your load times.

Otherwise, looking into some space saving utilities to help clean up your current disk. WinDirStat will help you see where the greatest concentrations of data are on your machine, and help you clean up efficiently. BleachBit will help to clear out junk taking up space on your PC. I recommend this over CCleaner. ESO is worth the pain of getting it installed if you're a fan of MMOs and Elder Scrolls

Have you tried running WinDirStat?

https://windirstat.net/

It helps me find the bloat and then either delete or transfer.

Your drive will probably run much faster if you’re able to get to a free space threshold , ymmv depending on drive type.

Use a program like WinDirStat or JDiskReport and see what they report.

Also, at any time did you have your dropbox linked to OSX machine?

Disk Inventory X is a solid program.

I personally use Grand Perspective http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net

Within both programs you'll see a visual representation of your hard drive, and what is taking up space. If you backup iOS devices to iTunes, you'll likely find MobileSync is using a good amount of space.

https://www.userbenchmark.com/Software

tell him to run a benchmark test on this site and post it on this thread ,it would give a first glance on the problem ,it could be a bottleneck of some sort,the ddu is a possible solutions but we got little info to be sure,the hz on the monitor should only affect fps when vsync is on

No, and SLI isn't worth it anyway. Hardly any games benefit from it and others actually perform worse. Rune userbenchmark and see if any of your components are underperforming.

Interesting, because I absolutely love the app DaisyDisk and think it's far and away the best disk space visualiser I've used. The radial pie chart makes clearing space much more effortless than square ones like DiskInventoryX. Is this instance somewhere that pie charts ARE valuable?

Just a PSA that WizTree (or alternatively WinDirStat but it's way slower) are both free and amazing tools for finding out what files on your PC are taking up space. Had the same problem a month ago.

SpaceSniffer is quite nice if you need a program like that but there is no reason to keep it on your computer all the time. WinDirStat is a similar program that I personally prefer.

There's no reason to delete/clean up registry entries. There is no measurable performance difference in doing so at all, and it can cause issues.

I personally don't recommend installing program to uninstall a program unless for example a program is corrupt in some way and can't be uninstalled through normal means. Usually everything is removed when something is uninstalled, often enough in my opinion. Taking a look in places where stuff can be left behind takes 10 minutes or less and it's not something you need to do often.

Also keep in mind that Windows 10 has something called Storage Sense that you can run to clean up basic stuff like temp files, thumbnails, old Windows Update/Windows Install files, etc. You can turn it on to do it once a month automatically*(you can also set it up to only run when you're low on storage space, or once a day/week)*.

I'm just saying that's where they should be, alright?

If they're not there then it's probably not something you need to be worrying about.

Still, if you're worried about drive space? If I can't find where all my HD space has gone, I run a scan with WinDirStat.

WinDirStat

Have you ever wondered how the fuck you have that many space used on your disks but cba to browse directory by directory and find out?

This is a fucking godsend.

That was it! I was using WinDirStat (great program to graphically view disk usage), and not running it as an admin. So It wasn't showing me the 77GB of log files in C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC2

The bleachbit website is pure internet gold

https://www.bleachbit.org/cloth-or-something

My favorite article on their site:

https://www.bleachbit.org/news/how-delete-secret-emails-microsoft-exchange

If your drive is that small, run a program called WinDirStat. It will show you exactly which folder has the most data in it. My guess would be updates or the Temp folder. I had this same issue and ended up having to delete over 250gb of microsoft updates from the last 3-4 years it apparently didn't remove after installation.

https://windirstat.net/download.html

Just like what /u/tomble said, I definitely think you should use windirstat first and see what folders/files are eating up space, this will help you get to the bottom of this issue and will show you what folders you can then clear up space in. Depending on what files you find eating space will help resolve everything too. This isn't the sort of thing that malware usually does, so I doubt that's what's happening, though it is possible.

Even if you got tron to run in your current state, there's a good chance tron might not even resolve the issue here unless the files eating space happen to be in temp folders that tron clears. If the files are somewhere else and aren't anything that trona sees as malicious, it'll just ignore them.

https://windirstat.net/download.html

GrandPerspective. It's a free app that scans a folder (including the root folder of your entire storage volume) and shows a nice graph of which files are taking up space.

When I want to build a PC, I usually use this site (https://www.userbenchmark.com/Software) to assembly a build and test if it is matching what I want.

I don't think they have FFXIV there, but you can try find something similar or better to compare.

Ask seller to connect with you via TeamViewer, and to show you the hard drive, specs, settings, etc of the machine live.

Then have them run a benchmark, like from here live:

https://www.userbenchmark.com/Software

Use crystal disk info to see what your smart info says. https://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html That will give you an idea if your disk thinks its failing or not. Most likely your just having video driver problems. Halo online has lots of bugs with new graphics drivers.

Check if you have versioning turned on.

Also, if you're on Windows, you can easily see how the space is being used with WizTree.

A few different reasons, but these two are the most common:

1) How much do you store in your recycle bin? You won't be able to access or search for the recycle bin in your file explorer (picture to the left), but the space is still reserved on C: by default.

2) Some space is taken up by system restore points that you are unable to search for. If you want to see how much space is reserved for this purpose, do the following:

1. Right-click "This PC" in your file explorer and click on "Properties"

2. In the left menu click on "System protection", select C: and click on "Configure"

You will be able to see how much space is currently used for this purpose and also set a cap on it.

If you want to really see what's on your hard drive, you can install WinDirStat. But it's very common to lack ~10GB on a newly installed Windows 10 computer that you cannot search for, I do it too (9,5GB) and this computer was installed just a week ago.

Windows and bloatware most likely.

You could have a look with WinDirStat since it will actually tell you how big each folder is unlike modern Windows versions. When opening it, keep on eye on the green progress bar at the bottom. It takes some time for it to scan all your files and folders so folder sizes won't be correct until it's done scanning.

> I'm also curious if theres a better way to display files and folders, outside of the current file and folders system... If that makes sense... I feel a way to view the file system as a network graph would make sense...

Check out WinDirStat. I use it all the time and I love it.

I too work in IT. The bit that makes me twitch the worst is whenever he talks about Hillary's email. He consistently and repeatedly says that Hillary "acid washed" her emails. He repeated this as recently as this last week at a rally.

The whole situation with emails is complicated, but what actually happened is that Hillary's IT guy used a standard open source free secure deletion utility called BleachBit to delete her archive PST.

Fox hosts repeatedly mentioned "bleach"ing emails, so I assume Trump took this to mean she literally bleached her emails, and then changed the phrasing to "acid washed".

Bleach is a base, the literal opposite of an acid.

There's just so many levels on which he's wrong it's hard to unpack. Every time he talks about computers my head hurts.

WinDirStat can help with that. It'll visualize your harddrive and show you exactly which files or folders tare taking up a lot of space.

Also running Disk Cleanup can help.

Use GrandPerspectiv: grandperspectiv to scan your drive and locate which filles takes that space, then revert back to here we will tell you if, why and how to delete them...

EDIT: formatting

I think what you are looking for is an application like Daisy Disk. If you want to go the free route, take a look at Grand Perspective.

Get an app like Grand Perspective or DaisyDisk and use them to visualize your drive.

Nobody can give you advice on where to look because you could have files almost anywhere from any number of things.

Try using GrandPerspective to get a visual representation of all your files in your hard drive. The bigger the square, the bigger the file. Same folder = same color and they appear together as a group. I've been using it for a long time and it's really helpful. http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net

I like Space Gremlin because it lets you exclude folders easily. A good free alternative that has a easy to use graphical representation is GrandPerspective.

I’d ask you to expand, but I don’t want to put your bullshitting skills on the spot.

OP obviously meant something similar to istat menu

“Network Keep on top of what’s being sent and received for all network connections with history graphs, current bandwidth usage, and a bandwidth breakdown for the top apps, as well as detailed connection info, bandwidth graphs, public and private IP addresses, and an internet connectivity indicator.”

You’re imagining, it appears to me, as if OP is asking for some perpetual speedtest.net result. I don’t even want to try wrapping my head around the stupidity of that.

Pretty much three options as I see it: 1) You won the lottery, it is 16GB. 2)Low level bios/detection issue causing it to be picked up wrong. 3)High level/windows detection issue.

​

First, a sanity check: open the pc, take the ram out and read the small label. It's even less likely to be wrong than the box.

Second, run a standard benchmark. https://www.userbenchmark.com/Software is the one I use to make sure everything's running at a speed that I would expect. Should be pretty obvious how much ram you have.

Assuming results point to an actual problem:

Third, run the windows memory diagnostic. It's preinstalled and can be found with a quick search. Click the obvious choices and it'll do its thing. Should tell you what's up.

After what Sako549 mentioned please its a good idea to check hard drive health, I would first recommend running CrystalDiskINfo, this can diagnose the internal health of the drive, also make a note of what is its drive temperature, health and Power on hours.

Then check for file integrity with chkdsk /f c:, and that might take a while so use when the scale is not needed.

With these two tools you can gather a general view of the health of a hard drive, which is the mostly likely part of a system to fail over time other things considered.

Windows will pre-download some updates and also create cache files that can end up to be pretty large. You can check https://windirstat.net/ to see exactly how your storage usage is distributed

I wouldn't recommend Ccleaner personally. Avast were caught installing malware into it a few years ago. When it was discovered they quickly withdrew it BUT they still take users system information via Active Monitoring. Ahh, but I turned that off! Maybe so, but as soon as you re-open the program it re-activates active monitoring regardless.

I used to install Ccleaner on every system I fixed until the 2017 malware incident. I recommend BleachBit for cleaning these days.
Sorry OP, but others have already suggested ShellExView which is what I'd use also

>Were the emails classified?

You mean retroactively, like Clintons? Probably not yet.

>Did she wipe the server with bleach bit?

Are you suggesting wiping files with an effective wiping program is not a good way to practice computer maintenance? Bleachbit is one of many such programs which does what it it designed.

>Did foreign adversaries have access to the emails?

Did they have access to Clinton's? Do you have documentation to prove that?

>Nobody cares if the emails weren't classified.

Except Clinton's use of private emails was not illegal at the time. It was actually common practice by people such as Colin Powell and Condolizza Rice. Ivanka's use of privatre emails is illegal.

Will you shout "Lock her up?"

Their How to Delete Secret Emails from Microsoft Exchange Server article is hillaryious: https://www.bleachbit.org/news/how-delete-secret-emails-microsoft-exchange

I would definitely buy Bleachbit if I had to wipe a server. But it's very expensive.

There are a few tools on Mac OS to help you with this...

My favourite is WhatSize - https://www.whatsizemac.com/

There was another one I tested, but ultimately bought WhatSize instead, DaisyDisk - https://daisydiskapp.com/

Good luck!

1. Create a comprehensive backup
2. Erase and reinstall macOS
3. Manually restore (drag & drop) necessary data (yay spring cleaning)

• Make sure you have critical account credentials safeguarded
• Alternatively GrandPerspective is a great utility

Always have a great backup in place BEFORE you start manipulating your data.

Windirstat is a tool that will show you visually what is using up space.

https://windirstat.net/download.html

In general, stay out of \Windows altogether and make sure you understand whatever else is before you delete it.

It shouldn't harm anything at all, but it's odd that Steam isn't deleting everything when you uninstall (unless it's leaving mods or third-party utilities behind).

You might want to take a look at WinDirStat, it's a tool for identifying what's eating up your storage space.

1. Windows 7 has been out of support for 1.5 years now. That computer should no longer be being used when connected to the internet. Continuing to use it is a massive security risk for things like identity theft as well as giving attackers access to your entire network. Very honestly, that computer should be disconnected from the internet until you're able to upgrade.
2. Cleaning up single digit megabytes isn't going to help anything. Modern OSes and browsers will cache various files and data to speed things up, if you only have 8MB total free, you're talking minutes of normal runtime would fill that up. If you truly want to investigate it though, I'd highly recommend WinDirStat to get a good visual representation of what's taking up space. Additionally, this could be from #1, it's highly possible your machine has been compromised and is being used without your knowledge for other processes.

Windows folder description could be wrong, windows doesn't recursive calc it right, I recommend you to try something like WinDirStat, it have a tree view of the exact size of every folder.

Agree with all the comments about recovering deleted files. If you aren't able to locate after trying that, try to install WinDirStat, and it will search HDD for disk usage and might help spot out where large files are located.

https://windirstat.net/

Download JDiskReport, and run it on your hard drive's root directory (either "Macintosh HD" or "/" - I can't remember how JDiskReport shows it).

That will show you where all your storage has gone, in a nice interactive pie chart. (Click on a segment in the pie chart to open a new pie chart for that folder's contents.)

Use a tool called Grandperspective: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net

It will show you the files - every file on the disk, and you can easily remove the files as needed. Be careful to not remove system files.

I used GrandPerspective to see the real hogs of space that don't show up in programs like CleanMyMac and got rid of them. Just make sure you know exactly what you're doing, you don't want to delete anything crucial risk losing data. I can't believe how much junk builds up from old uninstalled apps (despite using AppCleaner to uninstall apps).

Grab this: Omni Disk Sweeper ... it's free and will do a thorough sweep to show you what's going on.

You can also get Grand Perspective.

What kind of apps do you use? Do you have Google drive?

Ok so if someone told you an initial Time Machine backup would take ten minutes that‘s just laughably wrong and I would ignore anything else they said.

That said I used Sierra and High Sierra for years and never heard of a “storage duplication bug” let alone experienced it. I still have a Mac on High Sierra, no issues.

I would stop the initial backup and run a scan of your SSD with the excellent and free GrandPerspective. It will visually show you all the files on your SSD; bigger blocks indicate bigger files. If you have a bunch the same size, hover over them to see if they’re duplicates.

Once you have a sense of where your storage is at, you can either proceed with Time Machine, or first go into Time Machine settings and exclude specific folders (as an example, old versions of Chrome have sometimes taken up a ton of space for me, as have old iOS backups and iOS installers, called IPSWs). Don’t go crazy with excluding if you don’t know what things are because they could be important and won’t be recoverable if you don’t back them up and then erase your SSD, which is a good performance boosting tip.

First, the operating system itself takes up a lot of space.

Second, download GrandPerspective - it's free, open source, reliable and will give you lots of details about where your disk space is going.

Download GrandPerspective and scan the system

> GrandPerspective is a small utility application for Mac that graphically shows the disk usage within a file system. It can help you to manage your disk, as you can easily spot which files and folders take up the most space. It uses a so called tree map for visualisation. Each file is shown as a rectangle with an area proportional to the file's size. Files in the same folder appear together, but their placement is otherwise arbitrary.

Download here

UPDATE:

I fixed the problem and reclaimed 43GB of space. Here's what I did:

Installed GrandPerspective as recommended by /u/Godders1

Opened Terminal and ran

security execute-with-privileges /A*/GrandPerspective.app//M/* 2>&-

This displayed the hidden files in my system and showed that /.MobileBackups.trash/ was taking up a huge chunk of space.

Next, in Terminal I ran

sudo rm -rf /.MobileBackups.trash

Profit!

Thanks!

Grand Perspective is a pretty decent way to visualize file sizes and determine what's eating up all of your space. By default it shows all files; you can probably use a filter to narrow it down to applications only.

I've not tried it on 10.10...

The default is to put it in your documents folder.

What you need to grab (aside from an external drive!) is GrandPerspective.

It's a free OS X app that will show you a visual map of what is taking up space where on your system.

Grand Perspective is a free app that will display a visual representation of every file on your computer. Just make sure when you select which folder to scan, you choose the root level of the Macintosh HD.

I've never used Omnidisk. Have you tried using GrandPerspectiv? That's been my go to for allocating drive space. Just make sure you scan the Macintosh HD, not just the Applications folder.