Have you ever unexpectedly run out of drive space on your workstation or server and wondered where all the free space had gone? This happens often enough and of course when you can least afford to waste time hunting down what is hogging up all your drive space. In the ‘old days’ we would use File Explorer or systematically right-click each disk subdirectory and selecting Properties hunting for a folder taking up lots of space and start pruning there - this is a very slow a laborious process which often least to less than satisfactory results.
Well - for those of you who have ever been frustrated doing the ‘find-the-space-wasters’ dance I have THE perfect FREE tool for you.
TreeSize is the perfect utility for hunting down the space wasters and recovering your valuable drive space.
TreeSize allows you to graphically see the drive space usage on your dirve and sort directories by size allowing you to quickly spot where the problem is and go right to the source for recovering disk space. When installed TreeSize can be started from an icon in the Program Menu or from the context menu of a folder or drive. TreeSize is very fast to boot - it a very quick and effecient way to focus your cleanup efforts for maximum effeciency.
Obviously - you mus be very careful when deleting files from your PC unless you are ABSOLUTLY certain you know what they are and are DOULBY sure that their removal will not harm your machine.
I have used TreeSize for many years and can personally vouch for its flawless performance. Once installed it does not run any performance robbing process or otherwise monkey with your machine. It is safe for workstations and servers alike. It runs on Windows 2000/XP/Vista with a version for Windows 9x/ME available also. While the web site does not specify it’s availability to server operating systems, I have installed it on many Windows 2000/2003 servers with out any problems what so ever.
- Eric Hobbs
Vista makes extensive use of NTFS hard-links, especially in the \Windows\winsxs folder where a hard-link is created for every version of every side-by-side assembly. When you analyze the winsxs folder in Explorer it will generally take up several GB (larger in 64-bit systems). The files actually reside elsewhere in the file system and are reported by Explorer due to the hard-link. So when you analyze the size of \Windows it will appear larger than it actually is due to DLLs being reported twice (once in the actual location and again in winsxs).
Additionally, NTFS allows for multiple file streams in a single file. The intention is that you can store metadata in the alternate stream (for example, IE puts a tag in downloaded files, so Windows knows to warn you that a file came from the internet before being opened). Malicious software can store any amount of arbitrary data in alternate streams. It’s a way of hiding data in Windows. This data, however, does NOT show up in Explorer’s view of file size (for some unknown reason). If enough data is stored in alternate data streams, it can be quite frustrating trying to figure out where all your disk space went!
Out of curiosity, does TreeSize ignore hard-links and does it include sizes of alternate data streams? If so, it would absolutely be killer!
Either way, thanks for the tip of the great freeware app!
The Professional Version of TreeSize beginning with version 5.0 does indeed handle hard links to accurately calculate disk usage, however this requires that TreeSize open the file which slows down the scan. I do not know if the free version of the software does the same.