How do I find out what’s filling up my external drive?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #58, I look at ways to find out what is taking up all your disk
space.

Incremental backups filling disk

So, if you are concerned that it’s some kind of an incremental backup method,
I would review the backups that you have set up. I mean, backups don’t happen
by themselves. It’s something that you would have had to configure
yourself using whatever backup program you are using. You configured it to do that.

I would review the settings and see if in fact the incremental backups are
continuing to accumulate on that drive.

So, given that clue in your very question, that’s the very first place that
I would point you – review the very thing you suspect.

Analyze your data

Now, let’s assume for a moment you have no idea what’s taking up the space.
In that case (and maybe even if you do), I would recommend you go take a look at
an article of mine called, “Where’s my disk space
going?” That will introduce you to a utility called TreeSize.

TreeSize will actually analyze all of the files on a hard drive and display
in sorted order where all the space is being used. I think you’ll find it’s a
very quick and easy utility to be able to identify just what files or what
folders are taking up all that space on your external drive.

With that information in hand, you can then take the next step, which would
be to decide what to do. If it’s data you don’t care about, delete it. If it’s
data that you do care about, decide whether or not you want to keep it. If you
don’t want to keep it, delete it.

If you want to keep it (maybe keep it somewhere else), move it. If you want
to take it offline, move it to a different device and take that offline. I mean,
there’s so many different options depending on exactly what you find.

And of course, if that then confirms that what you’re dealing with here is
that your backup program is simply accumulating data, then it may very well be
time to reconfigure you backup program to do things in a slightly different way
so as to make more effective use of this external drive.