Disk Cartography - clever disk space analyzer

Pros

• Well-designed user interface
• Automatic and manual filters
• Save and load scanning sessions

Cons

• Aggressive file deletion

Disk Cartography — Clever Disk Space Analyzer provides a convenient way to analyze your storage drives and free up space.

All computer users have at one point or another filled up a storage drive with no clear idea of what is actually on the drive. This is where Disk Cartography — Clever Disk Space Analyzer comes in. It scans hard drives, solid-state drives, external drives, USB thumb drives and so forth. After scanning, it provides many different views through which you can assess drive usage.

The user interface is a big reason why Disk Cartography is such a success. What goes on under the hood is undoubtedly important, but the user’s ability to understand what is being looked and what they can do with it is equally crucial. All the options you need are right there in the main window: search, sorting method, hidden files flag, size filter, change views, delete, move to trash and so forth.

As the program scans your drives in search of files, it uses filters to determine which should be flagged and what to do with them. Disk Cartography comes with a series of premade filters some of which are enabled by default and some which are not. You can also create your own filters from scratch or based on a preexisting filter. These filters not only detect files but let you instruct the program how to deal with them, and these can vary on a per-filter basis. So, you could, for instance, have zero-byte files automatically and permanently deleted, have videos moved to a dedicated folder where you will view them later and have old, unarchived emails moved to trash.

Disk Cartography boasts a reasonably quick file scanner, but of course, this is relative to other such programs. Scanning for delete-worthy files can be time-consuming work, and it can really add up when scanning large and/or multiple drives. You may be inclined to run the program overnight or while you are away from the office, which is not a bad idea. However, this program has an excellent feature in which you can pause and resume operations. The program even allows you to save sessions to file so that you can turn the computer off and pick up where you left off later.

One of the inherent problems with disk cleaners is that the more convenient they are, the more you run the risk of having files you want inadvertently deleted. That problem is particularly pressing with Disk Cartography due to how aggressive the automatic filters are by default, and you can make the program even more so if you choose. We would recommend not allowing automatic deletion and paying attention to what the program wants to delete—at least early on. Over time, you will get more comfortable with the program and be able to leave it to its own devices.

Pros

• Well-designed user interface
• Automatic and manual filters
• Save and load scanning sessions

Cons

• Aggressive file deletion