Every now and again I run into a free Mac app that everyone should have. Free? Yep. OmniDiskSweeper is more than a one-trick pony, but not so much more that it comes with a price tag.
Every Mac user has hundreds of thousands of files to manage, and some of them take up much needed space. Back in the day we had to compress files to save space. Then hard disk drives became cheap and had enormous storage capacity. Guess what?
Change Happens
Apr 29, 2016 3 of the Best Disk Space Analyzers for Mac OS X. OmniDiskSweeper has long been one of my favorite free utilities available for the Mac, and I use it often for my own computer and when trying to figure out what’s eating the disk space of other Macs I may encounter.
Last week I saw an advertisement for an 8TB hard disk drive for $150. 8. Tera. Bytes. Most Mac users have no need for such storage amounts. Worse, most Macs come with solid state devices– SSDs– and notably smaller storage. That puts us into a pickle where we still need to find and delete large and useless files we don’t want to keep so we can keep the little space we have.
![Review Review](/uploads/1/2/5/8/125829484/181258656.jpg)
Enter OmniDiskSweeper, a free Mac utility that finds files on your Mac, stacks them in order of size, and shows you where they are so you can choose to keep them or delete them.
What could be easier?
What OmniDiskSweeper does is drop dead simple. First, it scans the volumes on your Mac, then displays the folders and files by order in size. Second, it lets you delete files you don’t want or need with a big Delete button.
- View your files: when you start OmniDiskSweeper, it presents you with a list of disks attached to your machine. Double-click on one, and a new window opens with a column view listing every folder and file you can access, which it sorts by size as you watch.
- Clean house: the free space on the disk and the ordering of the folders are automatically recalculated as you delete the old, space-hogging stuff you don’t need anymore.
- Smarter than Finder: sure, you could do this with the Finder, but OmniDiskSweeper makes it easier. Since the directories and files are sorted by size, you get to quickly zoom in on the big files that are taking up all the space.
Easy peasy, right?
What kind of Mac do you need? Any recent 64-bit Mac running macOS Mojave or High Sierra is enough to get started. OmniDiskSweeper automatically displays all the disk drives and volumes connected to your Mac, SSD or HDD. Click on one and it begins the scan and displays folders and files in the appropriate order.
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/5/8/125829484/540620162.png)
What you don’t get is a list of which files are OK to delete and which are not.