Well, the thing about MacOS is that when you are out of disk space, it is hard to know what to do, you have a couple of built-in options that are imprecise or slow:
- Finder > Get Info. This is the most laborious way is to just search with Finder and then highlight a bunch of directories and see where things are. The problem is that this takes alot of time and it is kind of a mystery
- System Settings > Storage which gives you a map of the types of files but doesn’t tell them where they are.
Free Disk Inspection
One of the nice things the Internet is that there a bunch of free utilities that will help you find oout where the fast files are. They all use some variation of a 2D tree map where the area of a rectangle shows you how big a folder is and where you can see sub folders under there.
- Grand Perspective. This is most easily installed with
brew install grandperspective. It is the same way, wow what color gradients there are. - Disk Inventory X. This is another 2D tree map you can install with
brew install disk-inventory-x. The main thing is that the map is well, so 1990s, the gradient is pretty hard to look at. - ncdu. This is a terminal based system which is way faster and easier to use for terminal jocks like me with
brew install ncdu. Of these I have to say, you just start iterm and change to root andsudo ncduand you get a really fast view of files. Best for geeks.
Paid Applications
I’ve been using Space Gremlin for years. It is a paid application, but having used the free ones, I think they work pretty well if you don’t need them that often. I have to say thought I would pay the few dollars to get an applicaton that didn’t look so ugly.
