In the age of multi-terabyte hard drives and SSDs, one might think that the shortage of space to host files is not the main concern of the average user. But the truth is that the more space we are offered, the greater our expectations of using our disk… and the greater are the liberties that developers take when fattening the applications that we install.
And even, the ones we uninstall.
“Games that leave several GB of data behind after uninstalling should not exist in 2022…”, a Reddit user said two days ago when starting a thread based on his own screenshot, in which he could see how his disk it was still hosting 3.7 GB corresponding to the game Uncharted 4 and 1.7 GB of The Lost Legacy.
The ensuing debate has already generated almost 1800 comments in this time, with various ‘horror stories’ about the use of your disk space, such as the user who freed 200 GB previously occupied by Steam games that had not been completely uninstalled, or the one that spoke of 12,000 log files generated by a password manager that occupied a total of 17 GB. Or also the 1 GB in total that apparently simple software like Logitech Options occupies since its last update.
“What is that app?”
But a good percentage of the comments were from users who have been interested in the application used in the screenshot to show the portion of the hard drive used by each folder. When asked about it, ‘Robbiekhan’ explains that it is a free software called Space Sniffer:
“it is super useful and has been using it for many years […] to find remnant folders or files […] or simply to see where the storage space is going. Highlight folders that the built-in storage cleanup tools in Windows 11 don’t recognize.”
It is a tool that shows us the folder tree according to the relative area that each one occupieswith their corresponding subfolders (and files, marked in blue), and that allows us to search or operate with the files from its same interface (making it easy to delete or move it to another disk, for example).
It also allows us to view which folders are creating new files (or accessing the existing ones) at that precise moment, when lighting the folder in question. And all of it no need to install anything: SpaceSniffer is just a portable .exe file.
An adviceOf course: in order not to receive a multitude of warnings about inaccessible folders during disk analysis, it is recommended to run the application with administrator permissions.