What is OmniDiskSweeper?

OmniDiskSweeper is a tool for creating free space on your hard drive(s).

OmniDiskSweeper is a Mac OS X utility for quickly finding and deleting big, useless files and thus making space on your hard disks. OmniDiskSweeper makes this easy by highlighting the biggest files on your disks, and by noting which files are used by the system, so you don't accidentally delete important files.

How To Use OmniDiskSweeper

When you start OmniDiskSweeper, it presents you with a list of disks attached to your machine. Double-click on one, and a new window opens with a "column" view listing every folder and file on that disk, which it sorts by size as you watch.

You then simply browse through the folders and files and delete the large ones which you are no longer using. If a file is part of the system, it'll say so on the panel (in the list of Packages the file belongs to), so you won't accidentally delete something that would make your system stop working. The free space on the disk and the ordering of the folders are automatically recalculated. If you aren't sure what's in a file, you can open it by double-clicking on its icon or dragging its icon onto another application. It's that easy!

While this concept may seem awfully close to what the Finder does, it's actually amazing how much more useful it is for cleaning up your hard disks. Since the directories and files are sorted by size, you get to quickly zoom in on the big files that are taking up all the space and not worry about the thousands of tiny ones that aren't hurting anyone. For example, when I was first testing this app I ran it on my Mac OS 9 partition and discovered 10 Photoshop® scratch files that were 200 MB each, that had been hiding in OS 9's secret "Temporary Items" folder for months. Suddenly my disk was 2GB bigger! (Note: this application only runs on Mac OS X: but you can still use it to clean OS 9 disks attached to your OS X machine.)

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OmniDiskSweeper licensing (historical)

OmniDiskSweeper can be used for free to find the big files on your disks, but we also have a neat-o, incredibly high-tech "delete" button which we enable if you fork over $15 dollars at our on-line store. Sure, you could delete the files yourself the hard way, but for the price of a couple of Big Macs which will probably kill you from heart disease in later years, you can have a nice, simple button that deletes for you.

Download OmniDiskSweeper for Mac

Architecture

OSX Universal Binary

System Requirements

From Mac OS 10.1

Compatibility notes

Version History

To see the original page covering version 1.3.1 (v11) of OmniDiskSweeper please visit the archive.org link below to go wayback.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030218004600fw_/http://www.omnigroup.com:80/applications/omnidisksweeper/releasenotes/

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Known issues    
A bug in Mac OS X 10.2.3 can cause the fix_prebinding application (a part of the system software that runs in the background) to crash while OmniDiskSweeper is running. Updating to Mac OS 10.2.4 should resolve the issue.
If you run OmniDiskSweeper on a directory, then delete one or more files from the directory via the Finder, command line, or some other method, and then hit "Update" in OmniDiskSweeper, the application will crash. (A fix was promised for the next release of the application.)
Under some circumstances, OmniDiskSweeper may not mark some directories on a UFS drive as having finished sizing. They were looking into the problem at the time and hoped to have a fix.

1.3.1 (v11)
Mac OS X 10.1.x
Mac OS X 10.2.x    
Released November 14, 2002. Changes included:

Prevented the application from writing messages to the console on launch; they were all benign, but some users found them alarming. No other changes since the beta.

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver