>WinDirStat fans,
>As a new pet project, I recently started some substantial revisions to WinDirStat in my GitHub branch and will work with current maintainer (Oliver Schneider) to eventually publish a new release hopefully in the next few months. The current changes on deck speed up performance drastically (seconds compared to minutes in some cases). It uses less memory compared to recent alternatives (WizTree), is faster as scanning network paths, and obviously isn't pushy about donating (although I certainly would not discourage folks from donating to their favorite opensource projects).
>Oliver recently opened up the GitHub Issues trackers, and I would love to hear suggestions or known bugs for the existing version:
>For the nerds interested in the changes I have queued up, you can visit the GitHub page
Although I learned the hard way that if you run it on a Mac home folder, and have iCloud's "optimize Mac storage" turned on, macOS will suddenly try to download literally everything in your iCloud storage to try to count the size of it, probably filling your disk. Oops.
To me, this is a clone of (now dead) Space Monger https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=150
My use case is just: my disk is full, I don't know why. This happens on one of my computers like once a year, so the fact that it's slow is fine. It usually helps me spot some folder set that is taking up a lot of space that I don't need on that PC, or something large that is duplicated.
My personal favorite example is wedding photos and videos. Turns out: those are huge, I am not going to delete them, but they don't need to be backed up on every computer I own.
The two winning visualization types are sunburst and treemaps. Both have their own cons and pros, but in our tests user sunburst performed slightly better for regular users. My personal bet is that no disk space analyzing tool's developer took it seriously or tried to actually advance the algorithms. Most of the apps I know use quite straightforward implementation and haven't been touched for years. Guess a little bit of filtering, grouping and changing coloring algorithms could significantly improve the treemap's perception, but someone has to do the job.
disclaimer: I'm the original designer of DaisyDisk.
Users with Administrator access do not have permission to enumerate directories / files inside other Admin users home directories. So any per-user files are not counted in this scenario.
Source: ‘The mysterious case of the Windows server with a full disk but WinDirStat shows it as only half-full’ :-)
But I have quite liked FileLight which is cross platform https://apps.kde.org/filelight/
Likely not as fast as WizTree though.
Edit 1: source at https://invent.kde.org/utilities/filelight with GPL 2.0 licence
Edit: it seems they have! But I don't know about NTFS compression and alternate data streams.
This is a case of "If it ain't broken, don't fix it". This executable is from 2005 and still works flawlessly.
If you haven't tried it yet, I encourage you to!
- https://github.com/bootandy/dust (command line, extremely fast) - mate-disk-usage-analyzer (gui/gtk, a bit more intuitive and allows operating on files too).
It is known to run on Windows 95 (IE5), Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, Windows NT4 (SP5), Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, 8 and 8.1.
...it is also known to run on Windows 10 and 11, and likely any newer versions too. IMHO this is a great example of how software should be. One tiny binary that is very widely compatible, doesn't have any user-hostile "features", and remains stable and bug-free. It's a contrast from an industry that largely can't produce such achievements, is becoming increasingly hostile, and quite telling when there are already comments here complaining about its age.
WizTree isn't open-source like WinDirStat but "free as in beer" with optional donations.
There's also a fork of WinDirStat patched to read the MFT but I don't know anyone who's tried it: https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat