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.