A simple step-by-step guide to finding big files hogging your hard drive space
By Adam Shepherd | PC Advisor | 14 October 14
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Much like that one drawer or cupboard we all have at home, our hard drives have a tendency to get filled up with useless stuff that we should really get rid of. However, it can often be hard to figure out what exactly is eating up all our digital real estate. If you need to de-clutter your disks and don’t know where to start, we’ve compiled a handy guide for finding out what’s taking up all that space on your hard drive.
Alternatively, find out how to get more storage space on Android, or to coax some more speed out of your machine, read our guide on 5 great ways to tidy up your PC or laptop.
How to find out what takes up space on your hard drive: finding large files
If you’re just looking for a quick way to free up space, you can find the biggest single files on your hard drive by opening the file explorer and typing ‘size:gigantic’ into the search bar.
This will bring up a list of any fine over 128MB in size, which you can then look through to find any large, extraneous files such as movie downloads, outdated drivers and ISO images. However, always be careful and make sure you know exactly what it is your deleting, as some files could stop certain programs from running if removed.
How to find out what's taking up space on your hard drive: finding large folders
Of course, sometimes it’s not large individual files that take up room, but rather folders full of lots of small files. In this case, the best option is to download a small third-party program that scans your computer to inform you which files and folders are the biggest offenders.
Our favourite application for this task is SpaceSniffer. A small program that requires no installation, simply download the file from here, run it and SpaceSniffer will scan your chosen HDD, and then visually display your disk information using rectangular boxes; the bigger the box, the bigger the file or folder. You can also customize the view to show more detail, or double-click each box to expand it and find out which files or folders within that box are taking up the most space.
Once you've ascertained which files and folders are taking up excess space on your disk, you can delete the ones you no longer need and enjoy the increased storage capacity.
