top of page
blowfibernintpost

SpaceSniffer reveals the hidden files that eat up your hard drive space



If your Mac is running low on disk space or you've seen that scary "startup disk is full" message, you know it can be frustrating to free up storage. To deal with this problem, many people resort to external drives and juggle their files continuously between the disks.




SpaceSniffer shows where your hard drive’s free space has gone




GrandPerspective is a utility app that uses a treemap structure for visualizing disk space. Upon launch, it asks you to select a folder or drive you want to analyze. A view window shows the contents in colorful rectangle blocks.


Getting accurate details about free and used space on your Macis tricky. While there are many built-in techniques, most of them are unreliable for detailed use. Use Disk Utility and these apps to inspect and analyze your storage space in detail.


Storage is becoming more challenging to manage as media sizes grow larger. Keeping your hard drive or solid-state running efficiently is crucial to the upkeep of your system. Now more than ever, programs that help you to manage your ever-growing collections are essential.


Let's say SpaceSniffer is showing unaccessible space, or it displays an error log when you begin scanning. In that case, there's a good chance SpaceSniffer doesn't have high enough permissions to scan your entire drive.


However, there is nothing on the disk taking up abnormal amounts of space. We have ran disk cleanup but this has done nothing. We have ran 'WinDirStat' on the computer but that hasnt came up with anything, so we dont know where the space has gone. We have deleted some unnecessary files that take up space and have freed it upto around 500MB, but whenever the user logs on it just eats away at the space until theres none left so the user can no longer save files etc.


Open command prompt as admin, assuming Windows OS, type chkdsk /r and hit enter. You will get a message that the drive is locked and would you like to run check disk on the next reboot. Answer Y and hit enter. Reboot. The issue seems like a miscalculated free space problem. i have had those drive almost full and now i run chkdsk /r every year on all of the companies hard drives.


Do you run any backups on the computer? Like Cobain Backup? If they' run in mirror mode, it'll save an entire copy of the backup on the computer in a directory. This will eat up your hard drive space FAST.


We have several clients that are still on SAV 10 that won't spend the money to upgrade, and SAV likes to download everything it can until the hard drive is full. I use a program to find out where all the drive space is going because i've seen this so many times...


Hi, the problem sounds like a case where your System drive, and your user drive are the C: drive. On a windows machine, the system usually has the Swap file set to automatically grow as needed by default (kind of like thin provisioning a VM 's drive) What ends up happening is that you will run out of space, because there may be an upper limit, but it does not automatically allocate that when the system starts up. Here are a couple of solutions. 1) Go to the Computer proprty settings, under the Advanced tab, and select Settings under the Performance block; then select the Advanced Tab again, and click the Change button under the Virtual Memory block. Once there you will notice that at the top of the section there will be a check box that says "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives". If this is checked, uncheck it. Then look down the block about half-way, and you will see 3 radio buttons. Select Custom Size, and set the initial size and the maximum size to the same values.and click the Set button. You will be required to reboot for this to take effect. The second method is to add a second Physical hard drive if possible, and then following the same steps, set the C: drive to only 50 Mb, and put the rest of the swap file on the D: drive. Your swap file size should normally total up to 1.5 time the amount of RAM installed in the machine.


SpaceSniffer is an easy, fast and effective way to find where your wonderful free disk space has gone. Featuring a smart cached scanning engine, an easy and powerful filtering system and a nice to see animated disk layout, finding that old, forgotten, big JPEGs, database backups and so on is a painless operation. SpaceSniffer listens to file system events, so it keeps always in sync. It is capable also of scanning NTFS Alternate Data Streams.


\t \tSpaceSniffer is a useful program that provides users with a graphical representation of the contents of their hard drives. Although the results can be a bit overwhelming at times, we found it to be an effective way to view exactly what is taking up space on our computer.


\t \tThe program's interface is simple and intuitive. Users simply select the drive they want to scan, and SpaceSniffer sets to work analyzing its contents. The result is a mess of rectangles of different sizes that represent files and folders. A medium-size rectangle represented our application data, for example, and a smaller one represented our desktop. The program can also highlight groups of rectangles that make up a larger segment; it drew a white outline around the group of rectangles that represented the items in our program files. Clicking or double-clicking allows users to zoom in and view more detail about the contents of each folder. Although at first glance the display can look a little cluttered with its assortment of rectangles, it turns out that this is actually a very effective way of judging what's on your hard drive. We especially like that the program allows users to filter results by file type, size, and age. The program's PDF Quick Start guide is certainly not the most well-written documentation we've ever seen, but it's fairly detailed, and the program is easy enough to figure out.


SpaceSniffer is a useful program that provides users with a graphical representation of the contents of their hard drives. Although the results can be a bit overwhelming at times, we found it to be an effective way to view exactly what is taking up space on our computer.


The program's interface is simple and intuitive. Users simply select the drive they want to scan, and SpaceSniffer sets to work analyzing its contents. The result is a mess of rectangles of different sizes that represent files and folders. A medium-size rectangle represented our application data, for example, and a smaller one represented our desktop. The program can also highlight groups of rectangles that make up a larger segment; it drew a white outline around the group of rectangles that represented the items in our program files. Clicking or double-clicking allows users to zoom in and view more detail about the contents of each folder. Although at first glance the display can look a little cluttered with its assortment of rectangles, it turns out that this is actually a very effective way of judging what's on your hard drive. We especially like that the program allows users to filter results by file type, size, and age. The program's PDF Quick Start guide is certainly not the most well-written documentation we've ever seen, but it's fairly detailed, and the program is easy enough to figure out.


Most disk space management tools do not list alternate data streams, do not properly calculate hard-linked files and do not list the space in folders that you do not have access to, e.g. the folder "System volume information" folder in the drive's root. Without a tool that does all this correctly, you won't be able to get correct results for directory sizes. TreeSize Professional does this job once you activated the option "Track NTFS alternate data stream and hardlinks" in its options and have started it as administrator. Full disclosure: I am one of the developers of the TreeSize product family. A free 30 day trial is available.


Have you looked at your indexing, Windows.edb, file? A co-worker of mine had an issue similar to this where a large amount of disk space was being taken up why the Windows indexing service. We only found out about the issue after the user complained about running out of disk space.


It is crucial for the whole drive that this $MFT file has free space to store infors for new files, therefore Windows reserves some megabytes - this is most likely one part of the used space you see. Therefore event if you format a drive the now complete empty device will again have some used space because the $MFT file is there.


Probably the pagefile. You can run space sniffer, which is a very lightweight tool that graphically shows the distribution of file usage, in order to verify what's actually being used on the drive: -18512_4-10913555.html


Windows keeps some space on the harddrive (pagefile) which acts like physical memory and it manages that automatically in windows 7. To manage manually click Start and type "View Advanced System Settings"... that opens the system properties window. Click the "settings button int he performance section. Then click the Advanced tab and click "Change" on the virtual memory. There you can change the drive the page file is saved on, but don't go below the recommended amounts. 2ff7e9595c


1 view0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page