If you are like me, you almost never delete anything. And, it doesn’t matter how big a hard disk I install into my army of computers (my current main PC has almost 2TB of space although only around 500GB is actually free right now) I still manage to more or less fill it up entirely.

Well I got an email from a tech colleague today who was raving about a tool he had found on one of my work server hard drives while planning the migration of some mailboxes from one Exchange Server to another. I always leave a copy of this program lying around because it is very useful in trying to work out where all the really big stuff is hogging the disk space that you have long forgotten about and probably don’t even need anymore. I was quite surprised he didn’t already know about it as it’s been around for donkey’s years but since he didn’t it got me thinking; I wonder how many other people may have missed it.

So, without further ado, meet “TreeSize Free”, little sibling of the larger (not free) Tree Size Pro from JAM Software. JAM have been writing useful tools since about 1997, but this is probably my favourite. Basically it lets you scan a Windows folder structure in it’s entirity to show you which folders are taking up all the space. Once it finishes you have a complete listing of your whole disk, which you can drill down into to find the culprit files. You can display this space usage in a number of ways, and the program makes it really easy to find then delete stuff you don’t need.

The free version is perfectly suited for these needs and is a self-contained EXE, so no installation required to run it, perfect for keeping on your USB flash stick.

If you’ve not used it before then get over to JAM Software and check it out.

http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml