Posts Tagged ‘disk space’

I was recently clearing space on my laptop hard drive when I noticed Google Chrome was taking 20gb of space. You read that correctly: 20gb.

After some searching, people suggested it could be old versions of Chrome. You can see into the package by right-clicking on it and clicking “Show Package Contents”. Inside I did indeed find dozens of old versions of Chrome and deleted them all. However, this only brought the size down to 19gb.

I wondered if the cache might be stored inside the app. I wouldn’t expect it to be, as typically it is stored in the user directory. However, when I went to clear out the cache, it only had 400mb in it away, so that ruled out that as a problem.

Next, I went through all the files in Finder to see if I could spot any large files. I could not. This made me suspicious, so I opened up terminal and checked it from there.

cd /Applications
du -sch ./* | grep Chrome
195M	./Google Chrome.app

Google Chrome isn’t actually using the space: Finder is just reporting it incorrectly. However, it clearly showed up on Daisy Disk before, and disappeared after I cleared out all of the old versions. So whether they were contributing or not I’m not sure.

If you need to get a break down of how much space each directory is using, you can do that using the du command. Using a few choice options it will produce a list of all directories in the current folders and how big they are.

du -sch

When you use Windows, disk space randomly disappears.

When you use Linux, disk space randomly disappears just as rapidly. Luckily, when you are using Linux you can use the disk usage command to see which folders are eating up all the disk space. Chances are you won’t be able to do anything about it, but you can at least look at it.

I’ve wanted something similar that I could use on Windows to give me an overview of my directories and tell me where all the disk space was actually going. Recently I found a tool called WinDirStat which scans a drive and gives you a breakdown of the space, files and sub-folders of each directory as well as a graphical representation of where all the space is going.

For example, on my system the fact that half the map is blue suggests I really need to clear my WoW downoads out while the amount of green suggests Windows comes bundled with too much crap. More importantly I can see at a glance that Program Files is using 42% of my disk space while My Document is using 31% and I can then break it down into the various sub-folders and find the offending files.

It uncovers some interesting things – for example Thunderbird is consuming a crazy 4.3GB of space simply storing my emails! World of Warcraft uses 8GB. Windows by comparission only uses 4GB.