Colin's how to see where all your diskspace has gone page

Two good utilities here - one is a PM app, one a text mode app.  Both are old applications and have their limitations, but they do the job for me.

The first one is called PM Disk Map (here - 27136 bytes).  This is a 16 bit PM application from a certain Joel Armengaud from France.  I have only ever seen version 1.00 of this from 1995 and if there is a later version, I'd love to see it.  All you get is a small .DOC file telling you it's freeware and the .EXE file.  When you first run it, you get this:-

OK - all this tells you is that you have some drives and shows proportional space used in the bar graph on the right.  The real beauty of PM Disk Map however, is its ability to show you disk space used on each drive.  Simply click on the drive letter on the left, and the pie chart appears.

And you can then click on the directory name to drill down further.

And further on if you want.  The great bit of this is that you can instantly see where your disk space has gone - where the largest directories are and it's just a simple point and click function.  No fuss, no bother.

The downsides are:-

• When you click on a drive letter, it takes a while to create the initial pie chart.  This used to be a problem for me under 1.3, but sucessive releases of OS/2 have improved the multi-tasking ability.
• It's only a 16 bit app, so disk space of over 2 Gb fools the initial bar chart screen.  The pie charts still work fine however.
• No actual numbers are ever given on the pie chart.  if it had this, it would be a great all round application.

All you need to is give it a drive letter with or without directory and it will show you exactly what space has been used.  The space given, however, isn't what space has been used in that directory, it's what space has been used in that directory and all other directories underneath it.  An example:-

Now, the BLEND directory actually has just over 1 meg of files - the 1320631 given is the total of all files in BLEND and all its subdirectories.  Wrap your head round that and you're there.  The %abs column is the percentage of the whole disk partition taken by this directory.

You can just run TREESIZE E:\>t.txt and then you will have a complete list in t.txt of where the space has been taken on drive E:.

Combine PM Disk Map and Treesize, and you should have your hard disk under control.  All you have to do then is work out what the files you're about to delete actually do.........

Email me if you want some more information.

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Date 22/09/1999