Cool Tool: JDiskReport
April 12th, 2007 by SplineGuy
When a software need arises, I have pretty standard (and probably unwise) approach to solving the problem. Within the last couple of days, the warning popped on my work desktop that told me I was running low on hard drive space. I am unfortunate enough to have a desktop with mere 40GB of space. There was a day and time when that last sentence would’ve been utterly ridiculous. Anyways, my procedure is to start with a Google search to try to determine just what the best key words for my problem might be. Eventually I narrow down on the term and go hunting at places I trust for their recommendations. A lot of blogs (largely, TechTV alums) are my first targets. If that fails, I move on to places like download.com or Tucows and start trying software until I find the one I like. Install, Do I like? No? Uninstall. Repeat.
I wanted to find a utility that would map out the size of my directories, so I can determine where the “space hogs” are. In some cases, I’d be able to delete large unnecessary files and in other cases, I’d move them to a larger external hard drive or network drive.
I started with a Google search for “directory size” and realized that was a pretty good start. I found nothing on my chosen blogs so I went to Tucows and found this one that I REALLY like. I thought I’d recommend it to everyone.
:: JDiskReport ::JDiskReport enables you to understand how much space the files and directories consume on your disk drives, and it helps you find obsolete files and folders.
The tool analyses your disk drives and collects several statistics which you can view as overview charts and details tables.
This is ad-free uncrippled no-charge binary multi-platform software that never expires.
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In Windows, you can right click on a folder and select Properties. That will (eventually) give the total amount of stuff in that folder. This does you very little good if you take the default action all the time and drop everything into “My Documents”.
Text files are small, even alot of them. So 40 GB is filled by mostly audio and movies. How hard is that?
My policy is to never uninstall anything. Especially on Windows.
I definitely prefer to have a organization to my files in some sort of directory tree. So its good to be able to see how the files are distributed throughout my dozens of folders and the dozens of sub-folders, sub-sub-folders, etc.
I have a ton data from all sorts of research projects including dna sequences, function approximation and the like. The biggest part of my data is the various genomes I have stored on my computer.