Today I discovered SpaceMonger.  After giving it a go, I was impressed enough that I felt I needed to share a few key things about it.

What

You’ve probably seen tools out there already that show you how much free disk space you have on your PC. Home grown scripts, batch files, and various other expensive tools.  What I liked about this one in particular was how quickly it loaded and gave me the goods, how clearly it was defined on the website (an introductory video is the key to my heart these days, time is precious) but specifically for me for this tool, was this was the first one I’ve seen (there may be others but I had no need to look further) that supported looking at OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox for my disk space usage.  Sure I’m getting 30GB for free from OneDrive (not to be confused with OneDrive for Business and its new Infinite storage), but even that is starting to get chewed up and as you’ll see in a second, SpaceMonger helped me quickly pinpoint what was chewing up space so I could houseclean.  This isn’t like back when I had an x386 and I used to delete the help txt files out of Windows to squeak out every last kilobyte, but now with video and music, I’m eating up space at a huge pace but some of it just doesn’t matter and I’d like that space back.

So What

I thought I’d provide two quick examples tonight…

My local Surface Pro 3

On my work laptop, I have a number of things eating up space on my Tablet (and tablets have smaller drives which with the cloud should be fine, except every bloody cloud tool wants to sync locally –  synching OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, OneNote, Outlook OST eats up a tonne!  Thank goodness I’ve left Dropbox behind or that would be one more chewing up local disk space…)

1. Whoa. I have 11.4GB of an iPhone backup on this machine. I don’t need that… gone!
2. Whoa … again. I have 10.9GB of another iPhone backup on this machine.  Gone too!
3. This is my Outlook OST file.  At 4.2GB it isn’t bad but with Outlook 2013, I can throttle much better what I have truly local/offline so I’ll go look at that
4. This is my OneNote offline stache.  OneNote rules and rocks my life.  But it is interesting to see that it shows me which Notebooks (represented as folders) are the biggest –  gives me some thoughts about some stuff to archive) –  very useful
5. Ah the Hiberfil.sys.  Can you believe you can find this on a Windows Server sometimes (??). In this case I want it but I might now just find out if I can control its size some time –  particularly considering it is roughly triple the size of my pagefile (why?)

My Personal OneDrive

Ok, on to the new experiment.  With SpaceMonger, I can have it look at my personal OneDrive and tell me how poorly I’m managing stuff there. And let’s face it, considering I don’t pay for OneDrive, I can’t say I’ve been terribly picking or good at housecleaning.

1. Whoa, I forgot all about that music I stored once for a gig that I was Djay’ing. I have that somewhere else, that’s 3GB reclaimed
2. A 256GB movie file?  What?  Oh right, that one. Gone!
3. A backup of our old website?  That’s what the wayback machine is for now.  Seeya!
4. Interesting. My personal OneNote is nearing 547MB.  Hmm, I wonder if I need to keep all that stuff…
5. Oops. A backup of a training file on C#.  I had every intention of watching that but here we are 5 months later and who’s kidding who?  Adios!

Finally, if you like stats and charts, here’s some disk space nerd nirvana!  Giddy Up.

 

Now What

I like it.  Full disclosure, I got a free copy as an MVP but I was not asked or expected to write about it in exchange for this post. I just found immediate value in it and felt for $19 it was another one of those tools that begs the question “what is your time worth?”.  If I were to dig around to find what I gathered above, I can tell you that as a $250/hr SharePoint consultant, this tool gave results faster than 13 minutes of my time ever would…

Check out SpaceMonger here: http://edgerunner.com/spacemonger