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That Which is Nifty: DaisyDisk 4.25

In the world of disk optimization and disk cleaners for the Mac, the field has become pretty crowded. It’s easy enough to get people interested in clawing back dozens of gigabytes of hard drive space, and while a great selling point, there are currently applications out there on the market that promise to do everything at once.

DaisyDisk 4.25, developed by Taras Brizitsky and Oleg Krupnov and a group of translators and contributors, focuses on finding large groups of file clusters, grouping them by size, and offering a quick means of dragging them to a delete icon, getting rid of them, and easily reclaiming your hard drive space. The end result is an application that quickly scans your Mac, clearly shows the files and folders that are gobbling up your drive space, and allows you to quickly trim those down.

There’s also a gamification element to this, in that DaisyDisk keeps a running tally as to how much space you’ve cleaned up and reclaimed, pushing you to go after forgotten folders where huge files have lingered too long.

It’s the user interface that makes things interesting but can take some getting used to. After scanning a partition, move the mouse over DaisyDisk’s image map to get an idea as to what’s consuming the most space. File previews can be brought up to get a better understanding of what you’re looking at prior to clearing large folders out without a clear idea as to what might be in them.

DaisyDisk is able to go beyond what might be expected in that it also offers quick access to the macOS Disk Utility program for quick repairs, and it’s easy to enter your Dropbox or Google Drive credentials to see what’s chewing up space on cloud-based drives. This is a nice touch and an April update addressed login issues for cloud-based services.

It’s DaisyDisk’s user interface that can be both compelling and a bit daunting. Its ultramodern feel gets somewhat ahead of itself, portraying your hard drive’s contents as something between a scatterplot and a pie chart, which can take some getting used to. Granted, the DaisyDisk website offers a handy 59-second tutorial video that can answer a lot of questions, and it might be advisable to check this out first so you have a clear idea as to what you’re getting into.

The best part might be the price, and $9.99 for a well-written, focused app like DaisyDisk is hard to turn down. It doesn’t promise the moon or to paint your house while you’re sleeping, it allows you to easily see what’s occupying the most hard drive space, and it gets rid of it easily and effectively.

And that’s hard to argue with.

DaisyDisk 4.25 requires macOS High Sierra 10.13 or later to install and run, while legacy versions require macOS Leopard 10.5 or later to install and run.

So, take a gander, see what you think, and please let us know what you think in the comments.

Via daisydiskapp.com