OmniDiskSweeper is a utility that will scan your entire hard drive, and display how much space is being used by both files and directories in an intuitive, hierarchal display that is also color coded to help you zoom in on the largest space wasters. Items that are in light purple are measured in gigabytes, dark purple are in megabytes, dark green are in kilobytes, and light green are in bytes. You may be surprised by some of the items you see since, as mentioned, Mac OS X doesn’t normally show you all files via the Finder. You may see items preceded by a dot, which means the item is invisible, or UNIX directories such as /opt and /bin, which you normally don’t need to directly interact with.
OmniDiskSweeper Hierarchal Display Shows Who is Using Your Disk Space
OmniDiskSweeper also display files in either black, which means the file isn’t part of a package, and can probably be safely deleted, or in gray, which means it is part of a package and probably shouldn’t be deleted. It also displays a file name in italics if the file is a symbolic link, which is another indication of a file you probably don’t want to delete, unless you created it yourself.
While navigating the files on your hard drive, the display on the bottom of the window will show the name of the selected file or folder, the size, and an icon representing the file or folder you have selected. If you want to remove it, press the Delete button. You’ll be asked for confirmation, and if you’re sure you want to delete it, confirm by pressing the Destroy button in the dialog box.
So find out who’s taking up all that space on your hard drive, and free some of it up, and try OmniDiskSweeper today! Have any other gadgets that help you keep your system clean? Send an email to John and he’ll give it a try.