grandperspective - Visual disk usage tool

Are you visual or numeric? If you want to "see" the size of the files on your hard disk, this is the utility for you.

When I am trying to free up space on my Mac's hard drive (SSD), I always start by running grandperspective. It allows me to quickly get a visual picture of what is going on and what I can do to quickly increase my free space. I made a video to show you what it does and how I use it. It is longer (11 minutes) than my usual demos, because there are lots of interesting things to mention when looking at disk usage.

I also use the Daisy Disk utility for disk usage visualization, but its view is different. I feel I get more information from grandperspective for my needs. I will make a Daisy Disk demo video soon so you can see what it does.

Grandperspective can be obtained either from the Mac App Store or from the developers web site. They are the exact same versions. It currently costs $2.99 on the Mac App Store and is free if downloaded directly from the developer.

Download site: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net

The current version runs on macOS 10.9 'Mavericks' or newer. An earlier version is available on the download site that work on macOS versions all the way back to 10.5 'Leopard'. That gives you an idea how long this utility has been around!

-- Bill


FURTHER INFO ABOUT DISK USAGE: On the 256 GB hard drive (SSD) on my MacBook Pro, I have 101 GB Used space, 115 GB Miscellaneous Used Space, and 17 GB Free, according to grandperspective. That totals 233 GB. Two questions spring to mind.

1. Why isn't the total 256 GB?
2. What does "Miscellaneous Used Space" mean?

MY ANSWER TO Q1: The three sections only total 233 GG, rather than 256 GB, at least partly because I am using APFS and macOS 11 'Big Sur.' There are some hidden volumes that use part of my disk space and grandperspective doesn't include them in calculations.

MY ANSWER TO Q2: macOS uses the hard disk to cache certain data that can be purged if needed. For example, if Apple Photos stores your computers in iCloud, it may use the HD to store local copies when you work on them. They take up space, but they can be purged from the HD if space is needed, since they can be downloaded from iCloud if needed again.

Similarly as many backup snapshots can be stored on the HD as space is available. If the space is needed, the older backup snapshots are deleted by macOS, freeing space for your needs.

So 'Miscellaneous Used Space' consists of files the OS is keeping around that it MIGHT be able to use. So if you want to know how much space is being used, include that space in your calculation. But the OS can free up the space if/when needed. So if you want to know how much free space the disk has (or can obtain on its own) consider 'Miscellaneous Used Space' as free space.