The Evolving Worker

Running out of hard-disk space can cause troubles ranging from minor slow down to irreversible data loss when an application hangs.

In this article I present a couple of tools to cope with this situation and try to prevent it.

First two tips worth sharing:

• don’t delete files (or buy financial products) unless you really understand their use
• keep roughly 10% to 20% of free space to save time on the long run and avoid frustrating situations (like computer crash just before a presentation, ha!)

Using data vizualisation to find who is eating your space

See those colorful squares ? Their area is proportional to the underlying files size. Clicking on an area gives informations about the underlying file and allows to delete it, if relevant.

I believe this representation (called treemap) was invented by Ben Shneiderman in response to the common problem of a filled hard disk, for those interested in the story.

A few tools use these treemaps to help you track hard disk space eaters. Here are the ones I use, depending on the kind of machine I’m on:

• WinDirStat for Windows
• GrandPerspective when on my Mac
• KDirStat for Unix/Linux

They are all free and open-source.

The very neat thing with the treemap representation is its usefulness to help you apply the Pareto principle when chasing space: just focus on a couple of big blocks, be sure to understand if the underlying files are actually useful or not, then delete those files.

I usually timebox myself to no more than 5 minutes to retrieve the space I need with this kind of tool. Thanks to the visual representation, most of the time it’s enough to get back to work (or anything you were doing, that is).

Prevention is better than cure

To be warned before you actually get out of space, check out DiskSpaceMonitor.

For sysadmins (or advanced users) who don’t want to spend their whole day recovering lost files from crashes on their users machines, it can be useful to monitor the machines through the network.

If you want to monitor several machines on a given network to ensure enough free space is available on their hard disks, I recommend checking out SpiceWorks and its SpiceWorks inventory feature to monitor the current level of free space.

I’ve also heard good things about LanSweeper, although I didn’t try it myself.

Hopefully you’ll never get out of space again!