These days laptops are coming with huge storage space in the order of 1 TB and more. At first it appears that you will never be able to fully use such a large hard drive, but after a few months you are in for a surprise to see that hundreds of gigabytes of space has disappeared. Where has all that storage space gone and which files or folders have claimed it? You can find out all this very easily using a freeware tool called SpaceSniffer.
SpaceSniffer can analyze your hard drive partitions to find out how much space is being taken up by which of the folders and files. It then displays the result of the analysis in a graphical manner – showing larger files in large rectangles and smaller ones in smaller rectangles. It also works for all other kinds of storage devices like SSD, USB flash drives etc.
You can begin by selecting one of the available partitions in your system. If you do not want to analyze the whole partition then you can also choose a custom path pointing to a single folder. It will then begin the analysis and present the space use in the graphical format.
But it is not just a simple picture of drive space usage – you can actually double-click on any folder to view the space usage at that folder’s level. You can filter the files or folders being displayed to narrow down the files for you are looking for. You can also right-click on any file to see the File Explorer context-menu so that you can delete or open it if needed.
You can customize the way report is shown – less detail, more detail, show free space, etc. You can export and save the analysis report in many different formats for later use – simple file list, list grouped by folders, first level folders only or the binary snapshot.
SpaceSniffer is a very useful tool for hard drive analysis to find out how your storage space is being utilized. You might be surprised to find out how large files can be for various software. I was surprised to find out that my Firefox profile folder was taking up nearly 2 GB of storage space.
You can download SpaceSniffer from http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/.