Visualisation of data

I have managed to fill hard disks of all capacities within a few months. My first PC had 10MB of disk space, while I work on 140GB today (remember: that’s 14 thousand times more capacity in 14 years). Both were filled within 2 months. (An aside: the number of files / folders hasn’t growth by 14,000. The files themselves have grown in size. I have roughly the same number of files/folders today on my machine as I had 14 years ago.)

To regain space, I used to go through every file and delete the unnecessary ones. My favourite tool was the UNIX utility du (Disk Usage). It lists the disk space used by every subdirectory. I would sort the result and find big, useless stuff. Here are the first few lines of a sorted du output:

1342507 ./Books
1188020 ./Non-Fiction
1047607 ./Comics
842832 ./Non-Fiction.Magazines
594939 ./Audio
298737 ./Books/kokona – Business
172166 ./Books/Terry Pratchett
164246 ./Books/Terry Pratchett/Discworld
162287 ./Calvin
142274 ./Books/S
77407 ./Scripts
74858 ./Science

It would take 5 minutes to create the list, and 15 minutes to read.

Nowadays I use WinDirStat, which shows every file and folder in an intuitive, graphical manner.

Treemap from WinDirStat

This view is called a Treemap. Each small block is a file. Bigger blocks are folders. Colours indicate the type of file (MP3s are blue, AVIs are red, WMVs are yellow, JPGs are green, etc.). This view has many advantages:

  • I can see the relative sizes of files and folders.
  • I can get an idea of the % of free space (grey block).
  • I can see what type of files occupy the most space.
  • etc. etc.

But the most important thing is, I see the useful stuff at a single glance.

That’s the key in visualisation: conveying a complex topic so people get it in a second.

(Incidentally, Google has a TechTalk on visualisation, including treemaps.)

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *