Disk space is a precious commodity, especially in the business setting. Everything can be moving along hunky-dory one day with hundreds of gigabytes of free space – only to scream to a dead stop weeks later as the hard limit is reached. Yikes!
An obvious solution is to increase capacity – but is that always necessary? Of course not! Sometimes all you need is to free up disk space by eliminating old files and data that are no longer needed. Done correctly, this will cost you nothing and require very little time and effort.
Huzzah! May I present: WinDirStat, the free tool which can diagnose your disk space usage and even provide some limited cleanup functions. WinDirStat is a simple application which looks through your computer’s drives and folders before presenting usage statistics in an easy-to-read format which will tell you where your worst space-usage offenders are living. This equips you with the knowledge you need to figure out what can be deleted to maximize your cleanup impact.
The statistics are presented in the form of charts and/or lists: clear and concise. From the graphic below, we can see – for instance – that the Users folder is chock full. The Users folder can be expanded to reveal which users are hogging the most space, allowing a server admin to get in touch and inquire on the deletion of unneeded files.
From my own experience, WinDirStat is an invaluable tool to have installed on any server, period; when ran at least once a month, you can stay ahead of the game and prevent space usage issues before they become major problems. The application is completely free – no purchases, logins, or even irritating advertisements. Give it a shot!
To download WinDirStat, click here.
Categories: Free Tools
Austin Thomé - Cloud & DevOps Engineer 
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