Overtime your hard drive will be occupied by Junk files that you do not need anyway. This may include huge torrents, Music,videos spread all over your system.Here are some free windows tools that lets you scan your hard drive for junk files and free hard drive space.
Recover hard drive space using Treesize
TreeSize is a Useful windows Application that can be used to scan your entire computer and arrange the folders hierarchal in order of Sizes. It searches Hidden folders, system folders and tells you how much size each folder is consuming in your computer.
They have a Free as well as a paid version. The Free version would be sufficient for your Needs but just In case you want something extra ( like duplicate folder search and some advanced Visual graphics ) you can try the Paid version instead.
You can also free up some space in your System by removing Duplicate Files and Folders with Free tools we have discussed earlier.
Disk Space cleaner
Disk space cleaner is a tiny utility that can search for junk files in your system and clean them in a minute. It can be used to scan multiple drives at once in windows 98,me,XP,2003. Also features a cookie cleaner ,temp folder cleaner which you can use to clear the temporary internet files or cache.Very fast and effective tool to use on a daily basis.
If you want you can also recover the deleted files later on. An excellent option to free up hard disk space in your windows system. You can download and use the trial version of Disk space cleaner before buying the pro features.
Create a Visual heatmap of your hard disk with Windirstat
A freeware utility for windows but very useful.WinDirStat can be used to rapidly index your hard drive and create a visual map of your used up hard drive space. After that you can delete the files you do not need.
While you start the program you can index your entire hard drive or choose a selected drive for clean up. The folders are then organized in order of sizes and free space
Here is an Image of one of my drives scanned with Windirstat
As you can see all the files are mapped as an image and you can clearly visualize which applications are using how much space in your system.Every type of file is marked by a different color and the larger the file the larger is the block occupied in the visual map.To begin the clean up process just select an application or an entire folder.
Also See: Recover Lost data from USB drives
List large files in your System
Sometimes you may wish to list all the large files and folders that are occupying huge space in your system.In that case use List large files.It is a free portable application for windows that can be used to List all the files in a specific drive according to sizes and space occupied.You can use this utility from a USB stick on multiple computers as it does not require any installation
After the scan is complete double click a file and the folder containing the file is opened so that you can perform a manual deletion.You can export the file list as a CSV file for future use. A safe tool to use without worrying about any failures and calculating hard drive space.
What is exactly occupying your Hard drive ?
OverDisk can be used to completely analyze your hard drive partition or selected folders and see how the files are distributed in your hard drive. The files are scanned and presented according to the file system hierarchy as shown below
Start the app and select a drive to scan. It will take up some time for the scan to complete and once its done you can see the reports generated by overdisk as Bar graphs.
Another similar application is Scanner. It is portable and you do not need anything to install anyway.
What software or tools do you use to recover hard drive space in windows ? Please share your ideas with us
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