What’s Taking Up All That Space?

Alexa asks:

I haven’t installed any­thing new. I haven’t added any large files to my com­puter. But I keep run­ning low on hard drive space! How do I find out what is tak­ing up all the room on my iBook?

Apple’s Finder doesn’t cut it. It’ll tell you how much space is left on your hard drive, but it doesn’t give you a bird’s eye view on what is tak­ing up your hard drive space.

Enter Grand Per­spec­tive. This free appli­ca­tion gives you an inter­ac­tive, graph­i­cal “tree view” of your Mac’s hard drive.

Step 1: Down­load and install Grand Per­spec­tive.

Step 2: Select the hard drive of con­cern:
Step 3: Wait a few min­utes for Grand Per­spec­tive to scan your hard drive
Step 4: Be over­whelmed by the graph­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of your hard drive. (FYI, the largest block is my iPhoto library)
Step 5: Mouse over the larger blocks to find out what they are and how much space they’re tak­ing up, then click on the blocks you don’t think you need, then click “reveal” to see where it is in the Finder
Step 7: Delete and repeat!

This is an awe­some free app and I know it saved Alexa a huge headache; she found out that Azureus was tak­ing up 7.5GB of space. Need­less to say, she deleted Azureus and is now using Trans­mis­sion and enjoy­ing hav­ing almost 1/5th of her hard drive back!

note: There is a rhyme and rea­son behind the colours and group­ings of the squares that Grand Per­spec­tive uses: Files in the same fold­ers are grouped together, then fold­ers that are in the same fold­ers, etc.