So you bought a brand new computer with 1 TB hard drive capacity and you added another SSD with 512 GB for speed and flexibility. But then in a matter of a few months, you found out that most of your drive space is gone. And now you are wondering what happened to all those thousands of gigabytes? Where did all of your free drive space go?
Fortunately, it is very easy to find out how you have slowly consumed all of your free storage drive space through a free software called TreeSize. It is available both in an installer package and in a portable ZIP archive. The installer package adds it to the Windows Explorer so that you can right-click on any folder or drive to analyze its space usage. The portable version lacks this feature.
As you launch TreeSize, it presents you with a small window from where you can choose drive, partition or a folder to be analyzed. After selection, it performs the analysis in a matter of seconds. The default view displays all the files and folders in the selected location and the space they have taken. Sometimes it has to be launched with administrator level privileges so that it can access some system files or folders.
It offers four modes – size, allocated space, file count and the percentage. In the size mode, all the items are displayed with their sizes and a comparison is made with the total folder size. The allocated size mode shows how much free space is available under a folder. The file count mode is obvious and displays the number of files under each of the folders. The percentage mode displays the percentage of the total space taken by each of the files or folders.
TreeSize is useful in finding out the folders that are huge and taking up all of your drive space. We can also compress such huge files or files using NTFS compression feature available in Windows. With its help we can get rid of some of the large folders or files that we no longer need. For example, it found many large ISO files that we had downloaded for installing Linux many months ago.
You can download TreeSize free from https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free.