Running Low on Hard Drive Space? Use WinDirStat

Random Observation/Comment #420: I don’t know why I keep all the originals of the photos I took and don’t share in social media. It’s not like I’m going to look back at hundreds of thousands of photos that I didn’t deem important or good enough to post the first round through and relive every shot…

Visualization of my HD usage

My C:\ status bar was red with 26GB of 278GB free. Wait, what? How did this happen? Although I’m quite liberal with saving all my photos, I’m not torrenting movies and music, so where did all my hard drive space go?

A colleague of mine introduced me to WinDirStat and it put everything into perspective.

This application basically provides all sorts of file usage statistics so you can easily narrow down what’s taking up the most space. What I thought was photos was actually 100GB of Program files, Steam-downloaded games, Guild Wars 2, D3, and misc games I’ve long beaten just taking up a large percent of space.

With the easy interface, I found 15GB in the Recycle bin, 20GB of Temp App Data, and 10GB of misc videos I had stored 5 folders deep within my Pictures folder. Genius application and super useful for all your digital spring cleaning needs.

~See Lemons Digitally Spring Clean