a graphical disk usage analyzer

April 12th, 2007 mysurface Posted in Misc, X11, baobab | Hits: 27236 |

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn has improves in graphics and user friendliness, one of the tools install by default is baobab. Baobab is one of the gnome utils. As the name didn’t suggest anything, but it is a cool disk usage analyzer. As it scan your folders and present you the disk usage statistics reports in graphs. Look at the screenshot:

It is easy to use, I don’t think anyone will find it hard. When your mouse point to a portion of the graph, it highlights the portion and display the folder’s name. To Get more details information on that particular folder, click on it. You will get the disk usage graph just for that folder.

At the left hand side, where you will observed bars with colors. Those bars indicate the percentage of the disk usage. Try to right click on any one of them, and select ‘Graphical Usage Map’. It will show you another view like this:

The best part of this disk usage analyzer is that it support analyze remote site folder’s disk usage. You can scan through ftp, ssh, windows share etc. I have tried on scanning through ssh, which is easy. You only need to specified the remote site domain or IP address, port number, remote directory to scan and the user name. It will prompt you for the password and the scanning start straight away. The same way it present to you, the statistical disk usage graphs.

One minor drawback is it is not CLI user friendly enough, but I do discover you can actually scan a specific folder by doing this

baobab ~/mp3/japanese

But, there are no ways for you to scan remote side by specified any options through command line.
If you need to analyze your disk usage with only a light command, you can try du and df.

Further readings

Disk usage analysis and cleanup tools introduces the CLI way and the GUI way (KDE and GNOME).

An article about improvements on GNOME 2.18, it seems that baobab.is one of the highlights

Baobab Official Site. You can have more screenshots and downloads from there.

[tags]disk usage analyzer, baobab, gnome, gnome 2.18, ubuntu, ubuntu feisty fawn [/tags]