Mac Dir Stat — Support

Mac Dir Stat shows you where your disk went. It measures a disk or a folder and draws every file on it as a rectangle sized by the space it occupies, so the thing filling your disk is the biggest block on the screen.

1.Scanning a disk

Pick a disk in the sidebar and press Scan. The first time, an open panel appears already pointed at that disk — choose it and click Open. macOS requires this: a sandboxed app cannot read a disk it has not been handed, and no setting in the app changes that. The permission is remembered, so every scan after the first is a single click.

A whole disk of several million files takes well under a minute. A finished scan is kept, so choosing the same disk later shows it immediately, with a note saying when it was taken and a Rescan button beside it.

2.The five screens

• Overview — total, used and free, a storage bar broken down by file type, the folder list, and the treemap. Hover a block to see what it is, double-click a folder to go inside it, and use the breadcrumb to come back.
• File Types — every extension with its size, share and file count. Open one to list its files.
• Largest Files — the biggest files, filtered by size.
• Cleanup — caches, old downloads, disk images and archives, each with a size next to it.
• Benchmark — how fast the selected disk is. This one needs no scan.

3.Searching

The search field takes a file extension (*.mp4), a size (>1GB), part of a name, or any combination of the three — *.zip >1GB is every archive over a gigabyte.

4.“Unreadable” and “Unaccounted”

Some folders the system will not let any app read — other apps' private data, and anything protected by macOS privacy controls. Mac Dir Stat counts those folders and says how many there were rather than quietly leaving them out, because a total that hides what it could not see is worse than no total.

On a whole-disk scan the map also shows an Unaccounted block: the space the disk reports as used that the scan never saw. That is those refused folders plus anything macOS keeps outside the visible filesystem, such as local Time Machine snapshots.

5.Cleanup

Cleanup groups things you can probably do without: Xcode DerivedData and Archives, iOS Simulator data, Docker data, Homebrew, npm, Yarn, Gradle and CocoaPods caches, the Trash, downloads older than ninety days, disk images and archives.

Nothing is selected for you. Every deletion is confirmed with its size and count first, caches a development tool may still be using carry their own warning, and everything goes to the Trash — where the Finder can put it back. There is no permanent delete anywhere in the app.

6.Benchmark

The benchmark writes one 256 MB temporary file, reads it back, and deletes it. Reads and writes bypass the system cache, so the numbers are the disk rather than the memory in front of it. The random-read figure is measured one request at a time, which is why it is lower than a drive manufacturer's headline number — those are measured with dozens of requests in flight.

7.Getting help

Write to [email protected]. If something looks wrong, the most useful thing you can send is what the window said: the totals line under the title, and the number of unreadable folders.