SpaceSniffer is a freeware (donations are welcome) and portable tool application that lets you understand how folders and files are structured on your disks. By using a Treemap visualization layout, you have immediate perception of where big folders and files are placed on your devices. Treemap concept was invented by Prof. Ben Shneiderman, who kindly permitted the use of his concept into this tool.
Why do I need Space Sniffer?
Space Sniffer scans your storage drives in real time and lets you visualize how your files and folders are structured and which files are taking the most space. Space Sniffer is great for identifying big apps or files you can delete to recover space on your storage drive.
Is Space Sniffer free?
Yes, Space Sniffer is free. The author accepts donations for further development.
Is Space Sniffer compatible with macOS?
Space Sniffer is Windows only, but an alternative for macOS called GrandPerspective works similarly.
Which are other good Space Sniffer alternatives?
There are many alternative disk space analyzers for Windows. Among the best are WizTree, DiskSavvy, and TreeSize. All of them are free.
Start a scan process and see the overall situation. Bigger are the elements on the view, bigger are folders and files on your disk. You need more detail on a big folder? Just single click on it. The selected element will be detailed with its content.
Need more and more detail? Keep selecting elements and they'll discover their secrets to you. Need a larger view of a small folder? Then double click on it, and it'll zoom to the full extent of the view.
If you need to understand why no more free space is left on media, keep following bigger elements. Maybe you want to focus only on particular file types... ok. Just type the file type on the filter field (example: *.jpg) and press enter. The view will react and show you only JPEG files.
Features
- Fast and easy to use
- Supports drag and drop
- Export module lets you produce customizable textual reports
- Intuitive structure layout, multiple views for different media
- Zoomable elements, navigate like a web browser
- The Windows folders and file popup menu is accessible by right mouse click
- It's possible to restrict the view content by typing simple yet powerful filtering criteria
- Lets you temporary tag files with four different colors and perform filtering on them
- Different views of the same media can show differently filtered elements
- Customizable in geometry, colors, behaviors
- You can navigate even during the scan
- Smart cached scanning engine, multiple views, single scan
- You can refine a zoomed area by a secondary scan process, even with main scan active
- Reacts to file system events, keeps always in synch, warns you by blinking elements
- Can scan NTFS Alternate Data Streams
- It doesn't clutter your registry, only a plain XML configuration file
- It's portable, no installation required, just put the executable somewhere and let's go
- It's freeWare (donations are welcome)
Want to exclude files? Then type a starting pipe before the filter (example: |*.jpg) and press enter. The view will show everything but JPEG files.
If you want to keep track of examined files you can tag them. Four colors are available. Just hover the mouse on a file and press CTRL+1 to tag it red. There are keys also for yellow, green and blue tagging. Use them as you wish. You can also filter on tags (example: :red will show only red tagged files, :all will show all tagged files and so on). You can also exclude tagged files (example: |:red will exclude all red tagged files)
Want to know if you have old files? Type the condition in the filter field (example: >2years) and the view will react accordingly.
What's New
- Now it's possible to start an export to file from command line.
- Added classes filter (example: multimedia, archives ecc...)
- Improved stability when deleting a focused folder.
- Added "SpaceSniffer" to all floating windows title.
- Now paths with spaces behave again correctly in command line.
