WinDirStat: Find Out What's Using Up Your Storage Space

Have you ever experience losing gigs of disk space on your hard drive even though you're not saving any files? Often times I've experienced this type of problem. I'm always wondering what's eating up my storage space. A friend of mine suggested a software an it's been helpful in determining what those files are. It's WinDirStat.

WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Windows. It is very light and easy to use. It shows disks, files, and directory sizes in a tree list and a graphical format. Below is a screenshot of the main window:

As you can see the lower part of the window shows what files are in your hard drive and how much it consumes your storage space. If you highlight a folder in the directory it highlights the contents of that folder in the tree map (the white border). It is also color coded so you can determine how much it consumes the disk space (the red square are Paint Shop Pro 5 files, the green ones are .dta files).

Let me share my experience and how this program helped me solve my storage problem. In the office I've been working on a lot of media files (audio and video) which are often raw and has very big file sizes. Every time I'm finished working on them I'll copy the raw files into an external storage and delete the large file in my PC. I noticed that even though I'm constantly cleaning up my storage free of these large files, after a couple of months my hard drive only has less than 2 gigs of space left. After a lot of cleaning up (deleting cached internet files, uninstalling unused software, etc.) I've managed to free around 15 gigs. After a couple of days I noticed that I'm constantly losing disk space (around a gig per day). This happens even though I always  remove raw files after working on them. After a couple of weeks I can't delete anymore files as they are all needed for my work. I only have less than 1 gig of storage left on my computer. I asked my fellow content guy and he said that he'd experienced the same thing also. He suggests that I use WinDirStat. After downloading it (it's only less than 1Mb in size), installing, and running it, I found out who the culprit are: they are .cfa and .pek files. I discovered after a little research that when you open media files on Premiere and SoundBooth, they create these files that are ridiculously large. after deleting these files (as I'm not using them and I'll never use them again, since I can just open the raw file and they'll just create those files again anyway) I've managed to free up around 70 gigs. At last my hard drive can breath easily again.

The download page for WinDirStat can be found here. It is completely free. Other infos about the program can be found here. And oh, a direct download link for the program is here. I strongly support open sourced programs over c'd software. I recommend you do also.

Please try WinDirStat for yourself and tell us what uses up your disk space the most!