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Disk visualizer: DaisyDisk

DaisyDisk is a pretty famous name. I’ve heard a lot that DaisyDisk is beautiful, but as a “power user” I always feel ashamed about using a disk analyzer or visualizer (although no one really cares). I’m pretty comfortable with doing most filesystem operations right in the shell, and for other tasks too tedious for the shell (like renaming a bunch of files with no obvious pattern), Finder (equipped with TotalFinder) works just fine.

Today I was trying clean up my drive a bit, as there were only 22GB left. I knew where the main problem lied: a huge number of highres videos lying in ~/vid/staging, awaiting renaming and migration to my external drive. Anyway, it would be nice to have some visualization of a detailed breakdown of my disk usage, preferably on any level I want without multiple passes of du. The name DaisyDisk popped up from the cache in my brain, so I headed over to their website to download it.

The result is not disappointing at all. Look at this:

DaisyDisk screen shot

DaisyDisk screen shot

Beautiful. Moreover, functional. It indeed gives me a detailed breakdown on any level, within any directory (given enough priviledge). I can also collect items I don’t want and let DaisyDisk clean up for me at once (not surprising for a disk analyzer); this feature isn’t that useful for me since I know exactly where my queues of unorganized items are — ~/Downloads, ~/aud/staging, ~/img/staging, and ~/vid/staging.

By the way, DaisyDisk seems to be WinRAR-free. (Rest assured; I’m a good guy and I will purchase a license — these days whether to purchase the website or the MAS version is a headache, though.)