WinDirStat

Name: WinDirStat — Download free. Disk usage analyzer
Availability: InStock
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)
Author: Oliver Schneider

WinDirStat — Free Download. Disk usage analyzer

WinDirStat is a disk usage analyzer and cleanup assistant for Microsoft Windows. The program scans local drives, selected drives, individual folders, and command-line targets, then displays where storage space is being used through a sortable directory tree, an extension and file type breakdown, and an interactive treemap where larger files and folders occupy larger areas. Alongside the visual overview, WinDirStat helps investigate and act on disk usage. You can locate large files, search and filter results, detect duplicates by hash, inspect logical versus physical size, watch file-system changes, save or reload scans, and launch cleanup or Windows maintenance actions directly from the interface.

★★★★★

5.0(1 ratings)

Download WinDirStat (Official links)

File size: 2.8 MB

The latest version of WinDirStat is: 2.9.2

Operating system: Windows

Languages: English

Developer: Oliver Schneider

Price: $0.00 USD (Open Source (GPL-v2))

Flexible Drive and Folder Scanning. The scanning engine accepts local drives, selected drives, individual folders, and command-line targets as input sources. It supports refresh, suspend, resume, and stop controls during an active scan. Fast NTFS scanning is available where the file system permits it, and multithreading distributes the work across processor cores. Elevated privilege support allows the scanner to reach protected system locations that would otherwise be skipped, so the resulting report covers the full extent of the selected target.
Multiple Disk Usage Views. WinDirStat presents scan results through several coordinated views: All Files, Largest Files, Duplicate Files, Search Results, File Watcher, Extension, and Treemap. Each view answers a different question about storage consumption. The All Files view lists every scanned item in a sortable table. The Largest Files view isolates the biggest consumers. The Extension view groups items by file type. The Duplicate Files view collects items with matching content hashes. The File Watcher view tracks changes over time.
Interactive Treemap Navigation. The treemap renders every scanned file as a rectangle whose area corresponds to its size. Larger files and folders produce larger rectangles, so the dominant storage consumers stand out at a glance. You can zoom into a region, reselect a parent or child item, and toggle extension labels. Sizing can follow logical or physical size, and the visual style can be configured to resemble KDirStat or SequoiaView layouts according to preference.
Sortable File Details. The file detail table exposes logical size, physical size, percentage of total, item counts, file attributes, owner, modified time, free and unknown space, hardlink information, and hash prefixes. Every column can be sorted, which makes it possible to rank items by any measurable property. Logical versus physical size comparison reveals the effect of compression, sparse files, and cluster slack. Hardlink data clarifies when multiple paths point to the same underlying data.
Search and Filtering. Search accepts regular expressions and can be narrowed with path and name filters, size filters, and reparse-point exclusions. Results appear in a dedicated view where they can be sorted and acted upon. Filtering reduces a large scan to the subset that matches a condition, which helps isolate specific file types, naming patterns, or size ranges without rescanning the drive.
Duplicate File Detection. Duplicate detection compares file content by hash rather than by name or size alone. The hash algorithm is configurable, and hardlink deduplication prevents the same underlying data from being counted twice. Cloud-file safeguards reduce the risk of triggering downloads of placeholder files during hashing. Detected duplicates can be exported to CSV for review or further processing outside the program.
File Watching and Reporting. The File Watcher view records created, deleted, modified, and renamed events on a monitored location. This provides a running account of how storage changes over time rather than a single static snapshot. Scan results can be imported from and exported to CSV, and duplicate lists can be exported separately. Command-line CSV workflows support scripted reporting and comparison between scans.
Built-in File Operations. Items can be opened, copied as paths, selected in Explorer, or passed to the Explorer context menu. Command Prompt and PowerShell can be launched directly in a selected item's location. Files can be moved, their properties displayed, and individual files or entire folders deleted. The Recycle Bin can be emptied from within the program, which shortens the path between identifying a large item and removing it.
Windows Cleanup and Maintenance Shortcuts. The program provides direct access to Disk Cleanup, Programs and Features, DISM, shadow copies, defragmentation, CHKDSK, VHDX optimization, hibernation files, user profiles, Mark-of-the-Web tags, sparse files, and NTFS compression. These shortcuts consolidate common maintenance tasks that would otherwise require navigating through separate Windows utilities, and they operate on the same storage context that the scan has already mapped.
User-Defined Cleanup Actions. Custom actions can be defined and attached to selected items, extending the built-in operation set with commands specific to a workflow. This turns the scan result into a launch point for external tools and scripts, so repetitive cleanup procedures can be triggered from the same interface that identified the targets.
Interface Configuration and Integration. The layout is configurable, including column selection and larger toolbar icons. Dark mode changes the visual theme. Portable settings allow configuration to travel with the executable rather than residing in the system profile. Explorer context-menu integration adds WinDirStat to the right-click menu, and localization with locale-aware formatting adapts numbers, sizes, and dates to regional conventions. High-DPI aware behavior keeps the interface legible on scaled displays.

WinDirStat is free software published under the GNU General Public License, version 2. In general terms, this means the compiled installer and executable can be used without charge in personal or commercial settings, and no notification to the authors is required, though feedback is appreciated. The program has been developed for Microsoft Windows and is written primarily in C++ with portions of C, using the Windows API and common Windows toolchain libraries. Development began in the early 2000s, and the project has been maintained by a small team of contributors over the years, with the original work attributed to Bernhard Seifert and later maintenance and modernization handled by other developers, including Oliver Schneider and additional contributors credited in the project's history.

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