Are you a digital hoarder?  I might be but I am committed to cleaning up my hard-drive!  If you need to do some cleaning on your system, you can use Tableau to help you find the biggest offending files and to direct your clean-up activities.  The reason for doing this is that you may be experiencing the exponential growth in digital file storage that I’m experiencing (see graphs below).

Click here to watch a video of how I captured my hard drive information.  You need to do this to create the data to be used in Tableau for finding the files that are occupying most of the space on your hard drive.  With a few minutes of effort, you can gain a lot of insight into your digital clutter.

I’m not going to spend too much time talking about my personal results, since it only matters to me. However, I will say that I was able to knock-out a huge number of gigabtyes off my drive by doing this analysis, with no loss of functionality.  I was able to identify things like memory dump files that took many gigabytes of storage.  If you need more space or need to understand what you have, this is a great technique to use. Good luck!

If you like this article and would like to see more of what I write, please subscribe to my blog by taking 5 seconds to enter your email address below. It is free and it motivates me to continue writing, so thanks!

Shown below are some of the images that I created during my analysis.  These are basic Tableau type charts that were created in a few minutes.  You will likely create you own analysis, and for this reason, I’m not going to provide a sample file for this work.