I came across this in the Windows Off Topic Mailing List, it's WinDirStat an open source Windows Directory disk usage statistics viewer for Windows, ported from the KDE KDirStat application. I think it's a great demonstration of how good computer visualization can be in conveying information. It's a UI that Edward Tufte might be proud of (though the 3D lighting effect in the treemap might qualify as Chart Junk, though you can turn it off).
Each rectangle represents a folder on the disk - the larger the rectangle the more space it is taking up. The coloured areas within the rectangle represent files. The rectangles are filled with colour based on their file type (the top 12 file types have individual colours, indicated in the top-right pane, after that the files are shown in grey). Mousing over a rectangle displays the file name in the status bar.
The three views are also well integrated. Clicking on a rectangle in the tree map at the bottom automatically expands the file system treeview to the file and the file type is highlighted in the right-hand pane. Similarly clicking on the file type in the top-right hand pane highlights all of the files of that type in the tree map.
What I like so much about this is the number of questions I can answer in a short space of time, such as:
- What file types are taking up most of the space on my system?
- Where are the largest files on my disk located?
- Which folders are taking up the most space?
- Where are all of the zip files on my hard drive?
The image below shows the scan of my laptop tonight. It's showing that my Documents and Settings folder is taking up almost half of my hard drive. From the treemap and the file extension list on the top-right you can see that most of this is from JPEG files (12,000 digital photos from the last 4+ years), followed by DLLs (which highlighted that I had nearly a 1GB of space being taken up in a Recycler folder that I wasn't able to delete through the recyle bin or the explorer), zip files (VPC images) and bitmaps (scanned wedding photos).
Apologies for the off-topic rave, but I'm really impressed by the visual design and the practical usefulness of this tool. It's helped me clear around 3GB of files that were just wasting space on my hard drive after 20 minutes of using this tool.
