Cushion Treemaps

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Yeah, I didn’t know what it meant either .

Curiosity led me to SequoiaView, a (potentially) useful tool to review your disk space usage. It may not quite replace explorer, but certainly gives you a new perspective to what’s lurking on your disk. The interface, the cushion treemaps, is different, but soon makes sense when you play around with it (right-click to navigate), and the options. A browse through help is also a good idea to get the most out of it.

One caveat – it takes a while to scan a large disk – my 80Gb drive with 30Gb in use takes 5-10s on a 2.4GHz P4. The wait is worth it though, and the price, , is right too.

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This is a freaky bit of software. I’d sure like to see a demo of how it’s used, ’cause I’m stumped!

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You’ll get the best value by playing with it and , or help in this case . And I did say the user interface is different .
But, as an example, I culled some junk from my system with it. It’s easy to spot the larger files since the display shows the relative sizes (and you can use the options to show actual size in the tooltip). You can drill down, double-click, or right-click and “down one level”, until you get down to the junk. Then you can right-click and ‘explore’ to open explorer on the directory with the junk to delete it (delete is intentionally omitted from the context menu to protect people unfamiliar with this navigation method – a pity).

It’s intended as a tool for visualising large tree structures, of which a disk/file hierarchy is a good example (see Help | About treemaps | Basic treemap concepts | Example). Since it supports import/export of the tree structure, it could be used to visualise other tree structures also (I’ve seen some investment apps do a similar, but less sophisticated, display to show the relative value of portfolio components).

And I forgot (their) screenshot, so here ’tis

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Do you think this is any better than TreeSize Professional, which gives (surprise!!) a tree-structured report of folders and files, which can be sorted into descending size order? You can drill down to find out just what folder or files is using all that disk space, and assess these for removal/archiving/moving as appropriate. It’s saved me hours of work and is the first thing I reach for when someone howls piteously, “My hard disk is full!” (especially when it’s the C: drive of a server…).
[howl] [piteously] [Darn it, we have a smilie failure!]

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Detailed functionality aside, I have found it to be “better” in the sense that a picture is a thousand words. Its visual impact draws the eye immediately to the MB hogs. With something like TreeSize (from memory), you don’t have this immediate sense of relative file size comparisons.

Alan

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I prefer the price of Sequoia. It appears more direct, but the different visual interface may not be everyone. You also need to “toggle” between it and explorer for actual maintenance. So, I think it’s worth a thorough “suck it and see” at least, but ultimately a personal decision. Mine goes with Sequoia.

(ps Here’s a TreeSize via diegol, for those that way inclined.)

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Hi Tim,

When I first read the description and figured out in my head how it’d be, my first thought was that Sequoia wouldn’t be worth the download. After reading the discussion I thought there might be really something behind it, and well, now I must say I like the way it shows every file/directory from the root. So it’s a nice complement to TreeSize.

PS: my changing my mind has no relation with your linking to my post

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