missing hard-disk space? – the answer!

Many of us Win­dows users have expe­ri­enced the frus­trat­ing mys­ter­ies – we find our hard-​disks shrink­ing and shrink­ing after some period of usage. Emp­ty­ing the recy­cle bin didn’t solve the mys­tery, nei­ther did clear­ing the TEMP folder.

Here I’ll present two amaz­ing, free­ware prod­ucts from Piriform

CCleaner

This pro­gram is an excel­lent clean up util­ity. As far as I have tested it myself, this is unlike many other prod­ucts which try to delete as many files as they could to make them sound useful. CCleaner per­forms safe oper­a­tions and I haven’t broken my com­puter with it. On my first time use, it dis­cov­ered and recov­ered more than 1GB of my hard disk space!

Defraggler

Another free­ware prod­uct from the same com­pany. Defrag­gler is orig­i­nally intented to use as a defrag­men­ta­tion tool, but it sur­pris­ingly served extremely well at dis­cov­er­ing large chunk of mys­te­ri­ous files that choke up pre­cious disk space. One unique fea­ture this piece of soft­ware has is the abil­ity to defrag indi­vid­ual files. And the Ana­lyzer is blaz­ing fast too – it ana­lyzed my 80GB drive in less than 10 sec­onds. Then I switched to the File list, and I can imme­di­ately sort by file size to find out the biggest files on my disk!

Sea­soned users might say this cygwin com­mand accom­plishes the same result:

du . 2>/dev/null | sort -nr | less

But that would prob­a­bly take 10 min­utes instead of 10 seconds!

Update: WinDirStat

My latest favorite method to do this is to use WinDir­Stat. I’ll let the offi­cial screen­shot speak for itself:

Totally reveals the answer, although Defrag­gler could still be faster in show­ing the biggest file.