Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

• The installer for that new software tells you there's not enough free space on your drive...
• You're in the middle of downloading that big file from your favorite place on the 'net and the "DISK FULL" message appears...
• Maybe you're just trying to save another version of that big movie or art file you've been working on... and then you get that dreaded "There is not enough room on the disk" message...
• Or, you're looking at your stack of CDROMs trying to remember which one had that file you've been looking for...

Well, DiskSurveyor doesn't promise to make your hard drive any bigger, but it does show you, GRAPHICALLY, what's hogging all that space. Click on a folder and zoom in for a closer look. Or, zoom back out. Shift-click on a folder, and it brings up the ACTUAL folder so you and can drag the "offending" files to the Trash or your backup volume. Create DiskSummary files that list all the files found on CDROMs or any other volume. No longer will you have to waste valuable time navigating through folder after folder trying to figure out which files need to be archived or trashed to free up precious disk space.

Here are the some of the new features in DiskSurveyor 2.5:

• Support for Navigation Services, when available. (NavServices was introduced in MacOS 8.5; it can be used with MacOS 7.5.5 or later, provided that Appearance Manager 1.0.1 or later is present; on 68K systems, it also requires CFM-68K Runtime Enabler.) This is used when choosing volumes and folders to scan, saving and loading DiskSummary files, and configuring some preferences.
• A new consolidated view of the main scanning window and the Pie Charts display, along with the new Bar Charts display, for viewing multiple volumes. The Bar Charts display shows the volumes proportionally by size (similar to the main DiskSurveyor scanning window). Both types of charts can be configured to show only local volumes (ignoring network servers) or only storage (writable) volumes (not including locked volumes - CD-ROMs, etc.).
• Customizable shortcuts for displaying various Volume Chart configurations.
• The ability to print Volume Charts.
• Improved performance. Increased scanning speed will be most noticeable on newer Macs.

And, if it's been a while since you last tried DiskSurveyor, you'll notice many new features that were introduced in DiskSurveyor 2.0:

• The scanning window no longer takes up the entire screen, and can be resized and moved around the desktop. (Position and size will be remembered next time DiskSurveyor is launched.)
• The status bar at the top of the scanning window now shows much more information: File name, size, type/creator and last modified date/time of the file or folder currently being pointed to by the cursor.
• The status bar also has a pie chart of how full the volume currently is. Clicking on the pie chart will bring up another window with pie charts of all mounted volumes (disks, CD-ROMs, floppies and remote (network) volumes). Clicking on any of those will scan that volume.
• In the upper right corner of the scanning window, the "More Info" window lists the totals for the volume or folder currently shown, as well as how much memory the application is currently using. Clicking on the little triangle will open and close the "More Info" window.
• Icons are now drawn in the folder and file blocks when room is available, telling the user immediately what type the files are.
• A new Filtering mode, where the user can highlight files and folders based on five different criteria. One example might be to highlight everything older than 6 months. Filtering can be turned on and off with a single keystroke.
• Memory usage is no longer set through the Preferred Memory setting, as it was in all previous versions -- DiskSurveyor now uses Temporary System Memory. As a result, the number of files on the disk that DiskSurveyor can scan is virtually unlimited.
• Various changes were made to decrease the time it takes to scan the disk. With the improved memory management in this new version of DiskSurveyor, it scans a disk more than twice as fast as DiskSurveyor 1.4.1 -- for disks with a large number of files, it can be more than 3 times faster. (Your mileage may vary.)

DiskSurveyor requires System 7 or greater and at least 256 colors (or shades of gray) are recommended. (For those older Macs, Color QuickDraw is required.)

DiskSurveyor. A different way to look at your hard drive and CDROMs.

Shareware $15 (US)

Here's what some happy users are saying about DiskSurveyor --

"Every so often - but not very - a utility appears which not only fills a gap but does it with genuine panache. DiskSurveyor - which I purchased 20 minutes ago through KAGI - is one such. A really great idea at a real bargain price. Thanks for sharing all your hard work. Believe me, it's appreciated."
---L.G., England

"Great little utility. Nice visualization of space. Clicking on a subdirectory is just right."
---W.K., Delaware

"On my very first test I found an application that was using up hundreds of megs on the drive, and hadn't suspected it at all. A big gold star for you and your program!"
---N.R., California

"DiskSurveyor is one of the few shareware packages I've seen where I immediately thought "now THAT'S useful, and well done"."
---J.G., Denmark

"I have tried your programme... and find it absolutely first class, fulfilling a long outstanding need very neatly indeed."
---B.S., England

"...very handy for cleaning the hard drive. Pointed out to me that the bulk of space I'd lost was being consumed by umpteen billion saved email messages from the past year and half..."
---G.P., California

"What a cool little app!"
---P.N., Japan

"...I really like the design of the application! The graphical display is, to my mind, brilliant in its simplicity and resulting usefulness."
---G.C., California

"DiskSurveyor is indeed a brilliant application and I take my hat off to you, for supplying we Mac users with an unparalleled utility: congratulations! ... I'm only too happy to support it."
---A.D., Ireland

"...Hope this thing will be a standard component of the future MacOS."
---T.T., New York

"I really like the UI [User Interface] in DiskSurveyor -- it's a good way of getting a lot of information on the screen -- I find it the most practical implementation of this display technique that I know of (in addition to being a really useful tool)."
---R.F., Massachusetts

"It's a terrific boon for people attuned to spatial relationships."
---V.J., Australia

"I LOVE this program!"
---S.M., Florida

"DiskSurveyor is one of the best little ditties I've got! Great for getting a handle on where all my space went. Good job!!"
---R.D., Massachusetts

"DiskSurveyor Rules!!"
---D.L., Oregon

Macworld picks DiskSurveyor as a Shareware Pick of the Month
"Keeping your hard drive organized used to be a snap when it could only hold a handful of files. But clutter becomes a problem when you can order megabytes with your computer the way you order fries with your hamburger.
Identifying the problem is the first step toward finding a solution. The next step often is mapping out the territory, a task that DiskSurveyor (Tom Luhrs, TwiLight Software) can handle for you. DiskSurveyor creates a graphical, hierarchical map of your hard drive. The software draws colored blocks representing the files and folders on your hard drive and sizes them proportionally to the space they take up so that you can easily identify and deflate oversize data fiefdoms. You have to pop back to the Finder to do the dirty work of shuffling and deleting files, but DiskSurveyor is still a handy reference utility to have around."
[Since that review, features were added to make it easier to pop back to the Finder and delete files.]

My Mac #24
"It's amazing to actually SEE, for the first time, what's taking up space. Somehow it allows you to more easily make decisions about what's got to be tossed or archived. ...The beauty of this program is its ease of use and visual display of information, so that even the least technically inclined can see what's in there."

TidBITS #596 / 10-Sep-01
"...a gorgeous, ingenious, and original interface..."   Full article by Matt Neuburg: Tools We Use: DiskSurveyor

"I just downloaded and tried DiskSurveyor 2.  I'd like to know this... How could anyone who has a disk, try DiskSurveyor 2 and not love it and pay the shareware fee immediately?   DiskSurveyor 2 is the answer to my prayers.   I am a higher education student and my digital imaging and graphics files are large (and scattered).  Being so right brained and visual, DiskSurveyor 2 shows me in a picture more than I could ever absorb and appreciate in a directory listing.  KUDOS to the brains behind DiskSurveyor 2 !!!"
---C.G., Michigan

Download DiskSurveyor 2.5 [BinHex] (449K) ... If the first site is busy, try downloading from our mirror site.

  If you use an older (pre-PowerPC) Mac -- such as Mac II, Quadra, etc. -- use this version:
   Download DiskSurveyor 2.5 (68K) [BinHex] (410K) ... If the first site is busy, try downloading from our mirror site.