At Secura Hosting Ltd we manage hundreds of servers for our managed hosting customers and one of the things we have to do regularly is ensure that disk space is well managed.
One of the tools we’ve used for years that makes like much simpler when it comes to housekeeping on servers (and indeed on normal PCs and file servers too) is WinDirStat.
WinDirStat is a very useful disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows. It will happily run on most versions of Windows. When you run it you choose which disk you want a graphical view of and then leave it to work for a few minutes. Depending on how big your disks are and how many files / folders you have on your disks it can take as little as seconds or as long as ten minutes. Once it has finished it shows a graphical view of your hard drive.
Different file types are show in different colours and the biggest files have the biggest proportional rectangles.
Note: if you are looking for an alternative for Linux, you are looking for KDirStat (apt-get install kdirstat on Debian-derivatives) and for MacOS X it would be Disk Inventory X or GrandPerspective.
You can download the Free / Open Source WinDirStat here: WinDirStat.
John is Operations Director at Secura and a Windows Server expert. Before all things IIS related, he was also a champion powerlifter.
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