Tong Family

Well, the thing about MacOS is that when you are out of disk space, it is hard to know what to do, you have a couple of built-in options that are imprecise or slow:

1. Finder > Get Info. This is the most laborious way is to just search with Finder and then highlight a bunch of directories and see where things are. The problem is that this takes alot of time and it is kind of a mystery
2. System Settings > Storage which gives you a map of the types of files but doesn’t tell them where they are.

Free Disk Inspection

One of the nice things the Internet is that there a bunch of free utilities that will help you find oout where the fast files are. They all use some variation of a 2D tree map where the area of a rectangle shows you how big a folder is and where you can see sub folders under there.

1. Grand Perspective. This is most easily installed with brew install grandperspective. It is the same way, wow what color gradients there are.
2. Disk Inventory X. This is another 2D tree map you can install with brew install disk-inventory-x. The main thing is that the map is well, so 1990s, the gradient is pretty hard to look at.
3. ncdu. This is a terminal based system which is way faster and easier to use for terminal jocks like me with brew install ncdu. Of these I have to say, you just start iterm and change to root and sudo ncdu and you get a really fast view of files. Best for geeks.

Paid Applications

I’ve been using Space Gremlin for years. It is a paid application, but having used the free ones, I think they work pretty well if you don’t need them that often. I have to say thought I would pay the few dollars to get an applicaton that didn’t look so ugly.