Cleaning House with DaisyDisk

Since I'm taking the week between Christmas and New Year's off and I have nothing on my schedule, I thought I would take some time to do a little digital housekeeping. My projects include: Cleaning up the hard drive on my macbook, updating the photo section on Pfeiffersite, tweaking the firewall settings on my home router and possibly getting my old PC "file server" back up and running, or replacing it altogether.

Today I decided to tackle cleaning up the hard drive on my macbook. With a modest 160 GB hard drive, I was starting to worry about storage capacity when I cracked 140 GB of utilization last week. My typical experience with the computers I have owned in the past is that about the time I start bumping up against the hard drive capacity, the thing is ready to be scrapped anyway. But my macbook is only about two years old and is still performing exceptionally well. So I decided that before I went out and randomly started junking unneeded files, I would give DaisyDisk a shot. I picked up DaisyDisk from MacHeist earlier this year and at the time, I thought it was a neat looking utility with little practical value. I was WRONG.

DaisyDisk renders a graphic representation of your hard disk (pictured) to demonstrate your overall utilization and where the disk hogs are hiding. Offering seamless drill-down capability and the ability to target chunky folders and files in a Finder window, DaisyDisk is the perfect tool for hard drive reclamation projects. Thanks in large part to dumping a ton of old TV episodes in iTunes, a bunch of ripped DVD's, several disk-intensive games and compressing my virtual windows install, I was able to reclaim nearly 65 GB. Further cherry picking old application data, documents and unused applications netted an additional 15 GB.

If you're a mac user with some storage issues, give DaisyDisk a try. If nothing else, seeing the graphic representation of all your local data is pretty cool.