SCAN MULTIPLE DRIVES IN ONE GO
Internal External USB sticks
Wiztree is a great free tool for identifying which files and folders are taking up the most space on your hard drive. The latest (fourth) version, which was released last month, adds a new feature that lets you scan multiple storage devices in one go (including partitions, internal and external hard drives, and even USB sticks), then quickly identify the space-hogging files on each – all within a single window.
STEP 1
Download the latest version of Wiztree (this was 4.01 at the time of writing) by going to www.snipca.com/38760 and clicking Download Installer 1 . If you already have Wiztree installed, click the ‘View updates’ button at the top-left of the window to update to the latest version. Make sure you’ve connected any external hard drives that you want it to scan and that they’re switched on (if you’ve split a single drive into partitions, Wiztree will load these automatically). Next, run Wiztree by searching for it within the Start menu.
STEP 2
To get a complete picture of all your hard drives, open the Select dropdown box and choose ‘Select Multiple…’ 1 . In the window that appears, tick the drives you want to include in the scan 2 . If you want to include only a single folder on a specific drive, click ‘Add Folder…’ 3 , navigate to that folder, then click Select. Once you’ve made your selections, click OK. Wiztree will now scan all the drives you selected. How long this scan takes depends on the number of drives you selected and their size, but it usually lasts only a few seconds.
STEP 3
Wiztree will now display a ‘treemap’ graphic in the bottom pane 1 . Each box represents a file on one of your drives – the bigger the box, the larger the size of the file. The key in the top-right pane 2 lets you see the file extension each colour relates to. The top-left pane displays a folder view of your drives 3 , along with size details for each folder. Click a box in the treemap graphic and the folder pane will update to show the size of the file and the folder it’s located in. At the top of the window, you’ll see an overview of the combined capacity of all your selected drives, along with the current used and free space 4 .
STEP 4
The latest version of Wiztree also lets you search for specific files across multiple drives based on criteria such as file name, size, extension and more. Select the File View tab 1 in the top-left pane, then type a search into the File Search Filter box. For example, to show only ZIP files, type *.zip. Alternatively, if you want to hunt down all files over 1GB in size, type 1GB. You can also combine search terms, so for all files larger than 1GB but smaller than 2GB, you’d type >1GB <2GB 2 . The results update as you type, so there’s no need to press Enter after each search.
STEP
5
You can tweak the treemap in Wiztree so that it displays only those files you’re interested in. From the Options menu, select ‘Colours…’. Next, select ‘Extension’ 1 - this tells Wiztree you want to colour each file by its extension. In this example, we’re interested in finding out how many photo, music and video files are stored on our hard drives and how much space they take up. We’ve therefore entered common file extensions (separated by commas) for each of the file types in the top three boxes 2 and given each a different colour 3 . Click ‘OK’ to continue.
STEP 6
The treemap will now update according to your settings (if you can’t see it, select the Tree View tab 1 ). In this example, all our various media files are clearly visible, with all other file types coloured black 2 . If you want to return the treemap to its original format, go back to the Colours settings window, click the Default button at the top 3 , then select Size 4 . The larger Default button on the right 5 lets you revert to the default colour coding.
STEP 7
Sometimes you’ll want to narrow your Wiztree scan down to a single folder (and any sub-folders contained within). To do this, first open the Options menu, then make sure ‘Windows Explorer context menu’ has a tick next to it 1 – if not, click this option to select it. Now close Wiztree, open File Explorer (press the Windows key+e) and navigate to the folder you want to scan. Finally, right-click the folder and select Wiztree 2 . When Wiztree loads, the treemap will display only the files and folders within the one you selected.