Hi fellow artist! If you’ve been doing “this” for a while, you will probably know the importance of keeping your hard drive healthy and not bloated. And if you’re here reading this, you probably want to make things easier for yourself. Let me introduce you to Windirstat.

Windirstat is an app that will represent your files in a visual way, where their size in megabytes corresponds to their size in a chart. An image is worth a thousand words, so let me just share a screenshot of how the app looks:

In this N26 project folder, I can quickly see the clusters of .c4d files and alembic .abc’s that I’ve got on the right

At a glance, there are bigger sections filled with smaller and smaller rectangles representing your data. The top left section is just a folder drop down, like the many you see in Windows Explorer. To the right, there’s a list of file extensions, ordered by how much space they are taking on your drive/folder. And underneath, is the visual representation: The actual size of the rectangle indicates how big the file is, and the color indicates its extension. It’s pretty intuitive. You can click on any rectangle and it will take you to the folder it’s in, show you the actual size in MB or GB, and give you some options. There is also a neat Percentage tab, so you can see which folders are taking the majority of your space.

You can directly click on a rectangle to highlight it, and delete items from the app

You can download Windirstat, for free, in the link below. Don’t be fooled by the 2000’s aesthetic ;)

WinDirStat

💡 As a bonus, if you’re on a Mac, there is a software that does this exact same thing - called DaisyDisk - that I used to use back when I was on MacOS. I don’t think that one is free, but it does have a trial demo.