Windows Tools, Help & Guides

Sometimes, when you start copying files to your hard disk, Windows throws up an error that hard disk space is low. This makes you wonder where all that hard space went and how it is being used. You cannot go through from one folder to another trying to find out which folder uses more hard disk space because there are thousands of folders in Windows.  You can use SpaceSniffer freeware application to analyze your hard disk space in a few seconds.

SpaceSniffer is a portable Windows application that allows you to analyze how folders and files are structured on your disks and how much hard disk space is being claimed by each one of them. When you first run it in your PC,  it asks you for picking a disk drive or specify folder path. Then it would analyze the selected item for the file and folder structure – dynamically updating the graphical display of how these folders are taking up space on your hard disk. The bigger the rectangle – the larger the file or folder size.

SpaceSniffer also allows you to filter the results if you want to limit the results to be limited only to a certain types of files. For example, if you want to limit the results to JPEG files only, then type in *.jpg in the Filter field of the SpaceSniffer window. You can also export the results in a plain text file. Many types of exports are available – the contents organized by folder, simple file list or just a summary of the results.

SpaceSniffer is a portable program and does not require any installation. But if you want to integrate it in your Windows Explorer so that you can just right-click on any folder and analyze its contents, then it can be done easily. You can add a few entries in the Windows’ Registry and a right-click context menu item would appear whenever you right-click on a folder.  Suppose you have unzipped the SpaceSniffer executable in the C:\Space folder so that its full path is C:\Space\SpaceSniffer.exe. Now you can open Windows Notepad, type in the following in it and save it as spacesniffer.reg.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\Scan_with_SpaceSniffer]
 @="Scan with SpaceSniffer"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\Scan_with_SpaceSniffer\command]
 @="C:\\Space\\SpaceSniffer.exe scan \"%1\""

To add these entries to the Windows’ Registry, now you can just double-click on the spacesniffer.reg file and click Yes when a confirmation dialog appears.

SpaceSniffer also allows you to run it through command prompt. If you run it using a command line, then you can specify the disk drives or folders as the command line parameters. You can also invoke the help function through the command line. You can find more about the command line parameters in the user guide included with the SpaceSniffer ZIP archive.

Download SpaceSniffer for Windows

Download SpaceSniffer for Windows

 

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