Home Reviews ,,,,, If there is a problem that all of us who use a computer share, it is that of useless and often very bulky files that we forget we have on our hard drive. For this there are countless applications that promise to help us find duplicates and large files, nested in folders and subfolders. Among these programs, few are really efficient, even fewer have a functional interface and none have that of DaisyDisk (, € 10.99 on the Mac App Store). Cyber Layman has put this interesting and praised utility to the test to see if it maintains its reputation as an innovative and functional product, and if it is really able to help us keep our hard drive in order.
The interface Certainly the most peculiar aspect of DaisyDisk is the interface. Forget window and icon navigation systems, forget double click and “cmd + i” to get information. Everything is summarized on a black screen with a colorful infographic reminiscent of a pie chart; it is a sunburst map, a particular type of presentation that stands out from the more common treemap. This element is the beating heart and the tool that differentiates DaisyDisk from anything else you have ever seen not only among file and duplicate search tools, but in general in the world of Apple applications. At the center of this sort of flower we find illustrated with a number the space occupied by the files, around separated into segments distinguished by different colors, we find the space occupied. Searching for the largest documents is as simple as finding the largest of these segments; obviously in the first phase of exploration, the one that is presented to us when scanning the hard disk, we will not have single documents, but only groups of documents distinguished by type or location. For example we will have the user folder, the multimedia documents, the iPhoto library, and the groups of folders and subfolders of the system. The size of each “petal” of the flower can be further analyzed and translated into numbers by a side panel; here we will see the actual weight in GB of a sector and also the subfolders that make it up. When we have identified a particularly cumbersome sector, we will be able to click on it at that point our graph will expand arriving in the folder we are interested in exploring and we will have a new indication of folders that take up more space. This process can continue up to the individual files if it interests us, although in the path it will be likely that we will start to find folders that we did not even know we had archived.
DaisyDisk's radial interface, the real beating heart of the application
Efficiency The retrieval and cleaning system is exceptionally efficient. Thanks to this graphic representation we will immediately have an intuitive view of the most cluttered (and bulky) sections of our hard drive; moving the eye to the right we will also know how much they weigh and what it is. Each section can at this point be dragged into an area that acts as a binder, where we will go to park the files or folders that we think are of no interest to us. Once we have finished cleaning we can permanently delete them. The developer, for security purposes, has also provided a sort of countdown that will allow us to change our minds for a few seconds before the destruction of the files takes place permanently. The efficiency of DaisyDisk seemed immediately tangible when after starting the scan (a few seconds on our 2.3 GHz MacBook Pro Retina) a folder appeared with about 3 GB of images nested inside another in turn placed in the download folder we had copied from an old Mac; these same images had already been copied into iPhoto. We also found two iTunes rental movies that have expired and are no longer visible because they were hidden from the system when we synced the Mac with an iPad that we don't use daily and that together took up almost 4GB. We were amazed to see that our Dropbox folder was 1.7 GB and inside it we found an old video clip of a test that weighed only 700 MB; finally we had 6 GB of data in the email attachments. In practice, in one shot and in a few minutes from the start of the test we got rid of almost 14 GB of completely useless data.
We can go deeper, discovering the files or folders that take up the most space
Quality is in the details DaisyDisk is a simple product but also extremely refined. What is striking is not only the interface that comes from the mind of someone who has an excellent vision in terms of the ability to create something visually universal, but also the attention to detail. For example, documents can be explored with the QuickLook preview, this will allow us to see what is inside a file, as we could do it by looking at it from the Finder, giving us a more precise idea of its usefulness. In addition, the system works not only with the hard disk of the operating system, but with any disk that the Mac is able to mount on the desk and is able to scan even more than one at a time. It also understands if a disk is an SSD or a magnetic platter disk, in the second case, when it was partitioned, it does not treat it as if they were several physical disks so as not to stress the hardware. In addition it also reads TimeMachine volumes (but does not allow, for security reasons, to delete anything from them) and is also able to analyze individual folders and scan them again when we have removed a document from them. Finally, in a few days of use on two different Macs, we did not have a single crash or malfunction, a sign that we are dealing with a properly coded program.
The DaisyDisk QuickLook feature
Conclusions DaisyDisk is a basically flawless program and an example of what an application should be like. Born on the basis of a real and almost daily need, it tackles the problem by presenting the most intuitive and simple way to solve it without being afraid to innovate, reaching the goal with absolute efficiency. All this is packaged in an absolutely innovative package from a graphical point of view, even beautiful to look at, which is not usual for a utility application, flawlessly coded and with excellent performance. Needless to say, for those who write DaisyDisk it is an absolutely recommended program whether you have a hard drive that is starting to show signs of saturation, or whether it has never even occurred to you that you need to free up space, because sooner or later this problem you will have it and DaisyDisk will help you postpone the need to buy a new hard drive.
Price and versions DaisyDisk is localized in Italian and is sold on the Mac App Store at 10.99 euros. A version that allows you to scan the disk in the administrator version and see the hidden space is on sale on the developer's website. The function is not entirely essential, but if you want you can buy directly from the developer by spending about 8 euros, or if you do not want to distribute your payment data to an external site, you can buy the Mac App Store version and then upgrade to the version for free. which the developer provides by downloading the version from DaisyDiskapp.com and placing it together with the one purchased from the Mac App Store.
So we drag the files or folders we want to get rid of onto the DaisyDisk internal recycle bin
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