Finding Large Files on OSX
After a recent security push at ephox (highlighted by a stolen laptop, and then me forgetting that I left my laptop in the office overnight), I've been working on freeing up some space on my laptop so I can turn on FileVault. A quick search of the internet found some great tools for doing this. My weapon of choice was Disk Inventory X. It presents your drive as a tree map, coloured by file type. I was quickly able to find the large files to kill (a couple of 1 GByte hprof files, and some large logs were the guilty parties on my machine).
Disk Inventory X is a good little utility for helping to cleanup up your machine. If you are ever in need of a tool for OSX to find large files, it is well worth using.
June 16th, 2008 at 1:00 am
Looks a bit like the one I use, Grand Perspective
http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/
If you use Time Machine, there’s a nice little hacked version that is great for finding large files which have only been backed up once and can probably be deleted:
http://db.tidbits.com/article/9597
July 10th, 2008 at 3:32 am
Rob: tracked you down! Thought this blog post was interesting; thought I’d pitch in my two cents.
I was actually using a tool called WhatSize (http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/) but have been looking for an open source or freeware version to do this. I’ll check out Disk Inventory X.
As far as the stolen laptop goes, I’ve got an app installed called ‘authsight’ (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2006120918170984). It’ll basically snap a screen shot on invalid login attempts and you can actually configure it to email them out too - pretty cool.
Though, the only person I’ve caught so far is my wife getting my password wrong!
July 10th, 2008 at 4:16 am
Andy - Well done on finding me :). Hopefully it wasn’t too hard for you.
authsight looks very cool. Have you got it running on 10.5?