Disk Inventory X is an open source (free) program that shows you where your free disk space has gone. And you may be surprised with its findings – I was shocked.
After you’ve downloaded and installed Disk Inventory X (which is very straight forward) launch it from your Applications menu.
- Each of your currently mounted drives (including the .dmg for Disk Inventory X if it’s still active) will be displayed.
- Select the drive you want to examine, and then click Open Volume.
- Depending on the size of your drive, the number of files on it, and the speed of your Mac (to some extent) it can take a few minutes for Disk Inventory X to finish its examination.
- When it’s done, you’ll get a complete listing of all the files (and folders) on the drive you selected back in step 2. To sort the files by size, choose the Size column (see screenshot below).
In my case, MP3 files were responsible for taking up the most space on my hard drive. I expected this. What I did not expect, was that Log Files took up the second most amount of space. As you can see (again, from the screenshot below) they account for 16.9 gigabytes of space.
- If you’re curious about a specific type of file (as I was) – highlight it by clicking on it once, then right-click (ctrl-click for single button mouse folks) and select Show Files in Selection List.
- A new window pane will appear and it will display all of the files that fall into the category that you previously selected (in my case, Log Files). Again, you can sort by size by clicking the Size column. Here’s where I noticed that a single file, VirtueDesktops.log, was 16.9 gigabytes in size.
- If you right-click on any of the files and choose Reveal in Finder, a Finder window will open and display the file in question.
- You can also delete files from within Disk Inventory X by right-clicking them and choosing Move to Trash.
I’ve been using Disk Inventory X for a long time now and have absolutely loved it. It gives a very intuitive feel to where you disk space is used.
I’ve also been using Disk Inventory X for a long time, but for me it doesn’t work *that* well because I also use FileVault protection. FileVault encrypts all the data in my Users directory (for those that have it turned on), and Disk Inventory X simple can’t see inside of it. Instead I get a big block of “spare disk image” that takes up most of the space.
I was going to post about how you can use “du -h -d 1″ from a terminal window to get the information you need, but I checked on the Disk Inventory X website forums and I found that you can simply select just your home folder, instead of the whole drive, to get the details on what is inside of that encrypted space.
For those of you that may ask “why use FileVault?”, the answer is simple: security. On any laptop that you use for work or have any private or sensitive information on (financial stuff, email, etc.), you really should encrypt at least the juicy bits. FileVault does it automaticaly and does a pretty decent job. I know it had some issues in 10.3 and earlier, but on 10.4 it has been rock solid.
Great article Ross, keep up the good work. Did you find what about VirtueDesktops was filling up that file? I’ve been using 0.54beta2 for a while and haven’t noticed anything odd (I just saw that there is an 0.54beta4 update, which I will apply today).
–jed
http://www.itsnotthenetwork.com
Jed -
I wasn’t about to open that bad-boy up in any text editor, but I did a tail on it and got stuff like:
2007-06-26 11:31:21.948 VirtueDesktops[128] PNDesktop.m:497 -[PNDesktop addWindows:]; Ended
2007-06-26 11:31:21.948 VirtueDesktops[128] PNDesktop.m:659 -[PNDesktop updateDesktop]; Add new windows
2007-06-26 11:31:21.948 VirtueDesktops[128] PNDesktop.m:663 -[PNDesktop updateDesktop]; Ending
So it really looked like it was logging nearly everything that occurred on a given window.
On my never-ending list of things to do is research why on earth this is happening, if it can be disabled (I did a scan of the Prefs and it doesn’t even mention logging, let alone disabling it) or started w/ logging disabled. Since it’s kinda a low priority for me (and VD has never used much CPU) I just setup a cron to kill VirtuDesktops, delete the log file, and restart VD every 12 hrs.
I did try 0.54b4 for a few days but it was actually more buggy than b3 (for me) so I reverted back to b3. The du method you mentioned above is EXACTLY what I told a buddy of mine to do when he asked about why his new MBP had much less free space than he thought it should have. My suggestion was actually:
cd / ; sudo du -h -d 1 > ~/Desktop/drive.txt and then import to a spreadsheet and sort by the size column. But then I found Disk Inventory X and that is really a lot easier
I’m curious – do you have a /Users/you/Library/Logs/VirtueDesktops.log file? And if so, how big is it?
Cheers,
Ross
Ross,
Interesting about the logs. Sounds like you have a debug build of VirtueDesktops. I looked for a log file and didn’t find one at all, much less one that was chewing up drive space. Do you have an MBP, MB, or PowerBook? I know people that have had some instability with non-intel macs and VirtueDesktops. It looks like there are at least a few other people with the same problem on the Virtue Forums at cocoaforge. I’m guessing you might want to see if there is an alternate build that has debugging turned off of whichever version is stable for you.
I suspect killing VD regularly is just fine, but you might consider just doing a “cat /dev/null > /Users/you/Library/Logs/VirtueDesktops.log” if there are any ill effects.
On opening the large file in a text editor, I suspect that the latest versions of Vim can probably cope just fine, but I’m going to test it in a little while and report back with the results if you are interested.
–jed
http://www.itsnotthenetwork.com
Merci beaucoup je cherche un tel logiciel depuis plusieurs années (sur pc) mais la ca m’a bien dépanné car notre OS X Server saturait, et impossible de trouver d’ou ca venait, avec disk inventory X ca a été direct !
Thanks a lot, i’ve been looking for such a program during several years (on pc) but it helped me troubleshooting our OS X server today. Disk was saturated and no way to find where the problem came from, with disk inventory X, it’s been fast and easy !
Oh my gosh. I just cleaned about thirty GBs off my hard drive. So far I haven’t run into any problems of the “Whoops, I guess that was kind of essential” variety yet. Thanks for the post.
Thanks for the tip. And here I was using du and the crippled shareware OmniDiskSweeper. Those logs will get you every time.
Great article–I’ve been using this for a while. As my movie/mp3 collection has grown into the +200gb area I’ve had to be memory conscious. This is def the best tool for it. Thanks for showing some extra tricks!