Happy Tuesday!
First, as promised: here's my progress report for my goal to make an enormous dent in my messy backup archives. I'm still working through the early phases of the data triage step, which means I'm copying large chunks of files over to a dedicated hard drive after first deleting the easy "low-hanging fruit" of things like core operating system files and program files. I worked on this a few times during the week and did pretty well:
- Week: Q1/2025, Week 2
- Files deleted: 62,391 (4.9GB)
- Files triaged: 48,295
All told, more then 100k files processed, and I deleted more than half of them. Woohoo! 🥳
However, I know I have at least 1.5 million to get through. Probably more. After I finish the first stage of the triage process, I'll calculate the totals so to get a better feel for the size of the job. Even so, I'm happy with these early results. How are you doing with your projects?
Now, for something else you might find interesting! In fact, this will probably be either incredibly cool or else eyebrow-raisingly pointless to most of you. I stumbled across it about a week ago, and it was so awesome and immediately useful that I downloaded, installed, and used it (not just tried it, but used it).
I'm talking about WizTree, a tool that lets you view the size of all files and folders on your hard drive(s) visually. Below is a screenshot of what it looked like the first time I ran it:
This blobby hierarchy of color splashes represents about 750 gigabytes of data on my main hard drive on my desktop computer. It took me only about 10 seconds to identify an unexpectedly large collection of pointless log files eating up almost 20% of my entire drive. It was ridiculous. I deleted all of them immediately.
Some of you might know about a very similar tool called WinDirStat, which I've mentioned in some Tidy Bytes material a long time ago. WizTree is fundamentally very similar, but modernized. More importantly, it runs insanely fast. Blindingly fast. While WinDirStat would take two minutes, WizTree provides the same analysis in under 10 seconds.
WizTree is free for personal use and doesn't have any annoying ads or popups, so I can recommend it without reservation. Sadly, it's Windows-only, so if you're on a Mac or you use Linux, you'll have to look elsewhere. There are pretty good equivalents on both of those platforms, though maybe not matched for speed: Disk Inventory X for macOS and QDirStat for Linux, for example. (There are more than a few others as well.)
When would this be a useful tool? Apart from the visual novelty, why is it useful to see such a visual representation of data? Here are a few ideas:
- Identifying large files and folders: This is the first thing I did with WizTree, and the main thing I did with WinDirStat in the past. There are other ways to figure out where the largest files on your hard drives are, but none of them are as intuitive as a big set of balloon-blobs.
- Cleaning up your hard drives: Run WizTree, sort the results by size, then work through each item and delete whatever you can. I have done this a dozen times over the years with great success.
- Data analysis: Visualizing all your files and folders makes it easy to see patterns in storage consumption. Is most of your storage taken up by photos? Videos? Documents? Unexpectedly large and pointless log files?
- Backup and archive planning: This is actually why I jumped at WizTree in the first place. I ran it on the data I intended to triage and saw immediately that the bulk of what's there is not going to be necessary to keep. (Hooray!) There's a huge collection of copies of old media that I know I won't care to hold onto.
If this looks intriguing, give it a try! To me, it seems interesting enough to check out what it shows on your computer even if you don't have an obvious use case for it. But then, I suppose many people aren't as weirdly nerdy as I am.
Until next week, happy data-taming!