TreeSize – Free utility to find, view and free up hard disk space

Posted on September 9, 2007 at 11:41 am

Trying to figure out where all of your hard drive space has disappeared to is often quite a challenge in Windows with all of the hidden folders and temp directories! As an IT Professional, one tool that I use almost every other day is TreeSize, a small utility that tells you exactly where all of your hard drive space is currently allocated.

Using TreeSize Free edition, you can immediately see which folders and subfolders are taking up the most hard disk space. Once you have that info, it’s a piece of cake to quickly free up hard drive space taken up by temp files or other useless data. TreeSize doesn’t even require any installation, you can just double-click on the EXE file to run it. This is actually really great because it means you can copy the entire program to a USB stick and run it directly from there on any computer.

Once installed, click on the Scan menu item and choose a drive that you would like to analyze. The nice thing about the program is that you can use it not only for local hard drives, but also a CD, DVD or network drive.

Wait a couple of minutes while the hard drive is scanned and then click on the sort by size button at the top right of the screen. It’s the one with the numbers 1 and 9 and a down arrow.

Now you can see and browse in order from largest to smallest all of the folders on your hard drive.

Using the Windows Explorer type interface, you can click on the plus signs next to each folder to view all of the subfolders and their sizes.

There are a couple of more buttons across the top of the program, which allow you to change how the values are shown (KB, MB, GB), display by number of files in each folder (file count), or by percentage instead of actual size. You can also select just one folder to scan instead of the entire hard disk by clicking on the folder icon at the far left. You can also print out the report for later reference if you like.

If you really like the free edition, you can buy the Personal or Professional editions for about $22 and $48 respectively. These versions are meant for businesses or people that want to track disk space usage over several months and get more detailed reports and statistics on file types, usage, etc.

So download it and clean up your hard drive today! Any questions, post a comment.

[tags]hard drive space, free up hard drive space, recover hard drive space, treesize[/tags]

» Filed Under Computer Tips

Comments

8 Responses to “TreeSize – Free utility to find, view and free up hard disk space”

Jeff said on : September 23rd, 2007 at 2:21 pm

I downloaded TreeSize but when I try to scan my D drive I get the following error message: “Path D:\: Incorrect Function”. Any suggestions?

akishore said on : September 24th, 2007 at 8:22 am

Hi Jeff,

Do you have Easy CD Creator installed on your computer? If so, you may have to uninstall it and get the latest version. Some of the older versions cause this problem. If that doesn’t work, try downloading the latest driver for your CD/DVD ROM device from the computer manufacturer’s web site.

Thanks!

Kristian said on : September 4th, 2008 at 9:35 am

Another way of cleaning your computer from junk is to use a duplicate file finder like Clone Tools.

Kev said on : September 4th, 2008 at 11:49 am

I use another program which has nicer charts and does everything else I need, and is slightly cheaper to boot:

http://www.ketara.ca/folder-sizes-disk-space.html

Luzi said on : February 16th, 2009 at 6:14 am

This is by far the most efficient tool to locate your space wasters (the tool’s age is a proof of its usefulness in this particular case…):

http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderz.....uoiaview//

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