Keep Track of Apple Disk Space with SpaceControl

Seasoned IT pros will tell you that a cluttered hard drive is indicative of more than just a cluttered mind. Running with little to no free space on your hard drive can lead to all sorts of problems. SpaceControl, a free app for Mac OS X, will help you keep tabs on how much available disk space you have left, and alert you when you're running low. It'll even e-mail you a reminder.







SpaceControl is a universal binary application, meaning it'll work on old Macs and new ones, as long as they're running OS X. The developer doesn't specify minimum version required, but I ran it on 10.4 without issue and one of his most recent updates was to fix a problem in 10.5. SpaceControl is a tiny app, and runs quietly in your menu bar when you open it. It displays how much available disk space you have left on your main volume, and when you click on it, a menu appears that displays how much space you have left on all other attached volumes, including network drives and external hard drives.



You can tell SpaceControl when and at what percent of available space to alert you. The default is set to 18%, and if you cross that threshold you'll get an audible warning and a text notice that you're below a safe amount of available disk space. It'll warn you against the dangers of running with no available disk, and recommend that you clean up your act as soon as you can.



If you like, you can also have SpaceControl e-mail you when you're running low on disk space, which is very helpful if you do a lot of downloading, transfer large files on and off external hard drives, or have any automated processes that create large files. Most companies have some kind of disk monitoring in place that alerts administrators to low disk space just like this. You have to use your own e-mail account though; fill in your email address, SMTP server, and login information, and SpaceControl will do the rest.

SpaceControl is completely free, and works like a charm. I'm running low on space, I only have a few GB left on a 100GB hard drive. As soon as I started SpaceControl it immediately alerted me, a sober reminder that I need to spin off all of my archived PCMag Radio and Gearlog Radio podcasts to an external hard drive.

[ via Lifehacker ]