It is not uncommon to see your hard drive filling up faster than you ever thought of. This is especially true in case of Windows. And nailing the culprit giant files on your disk is not always a rosy task. This is where we particularly miss Ubuntu’s Disk Usage Analyzer. Thankfully SpyGlass for Windows will do the job for you.
SpyGlass is a tiny yet powerful data visualizer for Windows which beautifully represents space occupied by various files and folders on your hard disk. It also doubles up as a handy duplicate file finder.
Installation and Usage
Installing SpyGlass is a simple hit-next affair. The installer is also pretty compact at mere 6 MB. SpyGlass works on Windows XP and above.
Download: SpyGlass for Windows [6.0 MB]
Using SpyGlass is as simple as it gets. All you have to do to begin with is just drag and drop or open the Drive/Folder you want to inspect.
Depending on the size of the folder the scan will take a while. We found that while the visual representation of the data will be done almost instantaneously, duplicate scan will take quite some time and can be slightly more resource hungry than it is acceptable.
You can disable duplicate scan by clicking on the red block during the scan
Once the scan is done, you will be presented with a pretty sunburst view of your data. Just click on any arc of the chart to dig deeper. To navigate back, click on the black hole at the center. If you click on the folders at the right, the respective arc will be highlighted on the charts. You can also hover on the arcs to just glance at the contents. If you click on the tiny arrow in the explorer view next to the folders, you can directly go to the folder in Windows Explorer.
The bigger arcs represent bigger occupancy of the disk space. Yellow chunks represents individual files, while blue represents folders. Grey represents a mix of files and folders. You will be greeted with a nice how to when you start the app for the first time.
The duplicate finder present is quite handy as well. To switch to the duplicate finder, just click on the files icon at the right most corner. To switch back, simply click on the circles icon present in the same place.
The duplicate finder can list files by name, size, modification date or duplicate count. If you select a file, you will be shown all the duplicate instances of the file at the right. Now the developers seem to be fond of visual clues a lot. If you click on the flag beside the file name, the flag will be marked red and the file is selected for deletion. If you click on the flag again, it is marked yellow and all the yellow marked files are available for moving.
While I have no problems with the approach, it can get confusing initially despite the help shown in the app. Ability to directly go to Windows Explorer seems to be surprisingly cut off here for reasons best known to the developers.
Verdict
While there is a provision for halting duplicate scan when you open a folder, it can spikes the CPU usage significantly. We would like to see this issue fixed in the future. Also desirable is provision to open Explorer in duplicate finder.
These quirks aside, with it’s simple dark UI and beautiful visualization of your data, SpyGlass can be immensely handy for inspecting the files and folders which occupy the most space on your hard disk. The duplicate file finder comes is nifty as well. A must have if you find your disk space diminishing.
