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I'm looking for a tool to summarize how disk space is being used on very large partitions. Our file system is around 950TB, mostly broken up into 20TB partitions. There are some really nice graphical tools for visualising these file spaces:

http://www.disksavvy.com/disksavvy_screenshots.html

http://methylblue.com/filelight/

But I'm really not sure how well they will scale. Does anybody have any experience of these tools and can make any recommendations? Even something that parses and summarises a really big du output would be a good start.

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You could use ncdu which will give you browsable statistics on the commandline with a equivalent performance as du would have. The output/interface will look like http://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu/scr

If you want a more Desktop-like UI, you could give http://www.marzocca.net/linux/baobab/ a try. It includes more beautiful visualization but may need more resources to display the disk usage.

Both tools will give you a browsable view of our disk usage so that you may step down into directories analyze those statistics and only update the usage of a specific directory.

Overall the time needed to display the disk usage mainy depends on the number of files not on their size. If you have a lot of small files (~1M), visualizing 950TB will take very long whereas with big files (>1GB) it will be amazingly fast.

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Look at the du program. It allows you to display the size of a directory.

du -ch

Will display the size of all elements in the current directory in human readable format.

-c Display a grand total.

-h "Human-readable" output. Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte and Petabyte.

-d depth Display an entry for all files and directories depth directories deep.

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  • +1 for -d. Clearly an underrated feature I didn't know of. Oct 7, 2012 at 8:57

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