Disk Usage Analyzer is a Gnome utility for analyzing disk usage. It displays statistics about your disk usage in an intuitive, easy to use graphical interface.

1. You start it by clicking Applications -> Accessories -> Disk Usage Analyzer.


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2. As you can see, the first time you run it, Disk Usage Analyzer doesn’t give you a whole lot of information.


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3. To get some real details, click the Scan Filesystem button.


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4. As you can see in the left pane, the directory that is using the most space is /usr at 63%. Click the little arrow to the left of /usr.


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5. This shows which directories within /usr are using the most space. As you can see, /usr/share is using 46.6% of the 63% of the disk that is used by /usr. Note that the total percentages of sub-directories add up to 100%.

   Go ahead and collapse the /usr folder and click on / Now take note of the graphical pane on the right. Try hovering your mouse pointer over the circle in the center.


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6. The popup shows that the circle in the center represents the root directory of the filesystem and that it and all of its child directories are using a total of 2.6 GB.
7. Next, I hovered the mouse cursor over one of the smaller, almost pie shaped pieces. You can see in the following screenshot that this represents the /lib directory which is using 287.6 MB.


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8. I clicked on the /lib pie piece and now /lib is represented by the circle in the center with its child directories surrounding it. The tree view in the left pane follows along.


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9. By hovering the mouse cursor over the largest piece surrounding /lib, I discover that /lib/modules is the directory using the most disk space in /lib


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10. Next, I collapsed /lib in the tree view and clicked on /home. I’m not surprised to see that my home directory is using the most disk space within /home, as indicated by this piece wrapping entirely around the circle in the center, since I am the only user on this computer.


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11. As you can see, Disk Usage Analyzer is extremely easy to use and provides a fast and efficient way to find out what’s happening to your hard drive space.