Hey sailor, welcome to Toolbox. This is the place where Motherboard'll be telling you every week about this or that bit of software that you really need to have on your computer or phone-computer now. Requirements for something to be in our toolbox: 1) It is actually useful, like in the sense that you might turn to it on a regular basis and for hopefully more than one task, 2) It is free, or really, really exceptionally cheap (or cheap relative to function, like a smuggled tethering app), and 3) it is useful to most people, relatively speaking. Please send your suggestions to michaelb@motherboard.tv.Maybe you think of your hard drive like a big sealed bucket. Stuff goes in, stuff goes out. But what happens inside of that bucket—where in it your stuff goes, how much space it occupies in relation to other stuff—is pretty much unknowable. This is more or less how I've thought of it—a place where things get shoved, a 12-year-old's overfull, bursting closet. And with a holy mess like that, odds are good some of that stuff is just forgotten by now.So, here's SpaceMonger. What the program does is map out your hard drive, give you a sort of birds-eye view: where things are, what's inside of what, what relative sizes are of programs and files and folders, and what's just a copy of something else. It's pretty neat and, importantly, intuitive. Using the software's interface, you can also delete, copy, and move things around as you like.The pitch:
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Installation was a snap and, at first, you're given just a blank space. You'll need to go into the "scan" menu and pick which drive you want to look at. The scan itself took me about two minutes, but I have barely anything on this machine. Right now, I'm rolling on a trial copy and in 30 days, it'll want me to pay $19.95 for a license. Which is even a better deal because it'll install onto a portable drive so you can use it between multiple machines. [Postscript: you can also download the older and unsupported 1.4 version for free.]All in all, definitely a handy if not terribly glamorous thing for the ol' Toolbox.Reach this writer at michael@motherboard.tv.Imagine, if you will, being able to fly over the mountains and hills and valleys of your drive in an airplane, elegantly soaring over the data and seeing from above how it all fits together. No matter how messy your data, no matter how jam-packed your drive, SpaceMonger can give you that bird's-eye-view you've wished for. With the magic of treemaps, as well as charts and graphs aplenty, you'll never be lost in your data again!