Does DiskWave support TimeMachine drives?
Yes and no.
Contrary to other disk usage utilities, DiskWave would not crash if the scan is performed on a TimeMachine drive.
However, at the moment, DiskWave has little support for the folders' hard links that are used by time machine. DiskWave computes the size of identical folders on TimeMachine volumes multiple times, which is slow and inefficient. Moreover, since the size of a folder is computed as the sum of all its children, the reported size of the top level folder could be larger than it really is. In extreme cases, the top level folder may appear to be larger than the physical size of the drive that contains it!
How do I display invisible files?
Go to “Preferences” (apple+coma) and select the “Show invisible files” option.
What do the colors mean?
The text color depends on the size of the item:
- Green: for small items of less than 1MB
- Purple: for average items between 1MB and 1GB
- Red: for large items over 1GB
Will DiskWave be available on the App Store?
No, at least not in the near future and probably never.
If I were to make DiskWave available on the app store, I would have to pay a yearly fee of 100USD, which is a lot more than what this website costs. As a consequence I would probably have to charge a little for the application.
Some of the features I plan to develop for DiskWave will not respect the strict restrictions Apple imposes on the App Store developer program. In particular, I would like to offer the ability to scan the drive using elevated privileges, which is not allowed (see item 2.27 in Mac App Store Guidelines
Addendum: As of November 2011, Apple has announced their intention to force developpers to use the newly available sandbox mode for all applications distributed on the App Store by March 2012. Sandboxing by itself is not an issue, but Apple's planned implementation is. At the moment, Apple does not make available any entitlements (i.e. permissions to go outside the sandbox) that covers access the the filesystem on a global basis. Entitlements only exist for files explicitely accessed via open/save dialogs or in some special folders. Unless this policy is revised, all disk size utilities will disappear from the App Store by 2012.
What is this system profile report?
The information reported by the system profile is completely anonymous and cannot identify either an individual machine or a user.
If you provide your consent, DiskWave will transmit the following information about your system:
- Mac OS X version.
- DiskWave version.
- Mac model.
- CPU data (type, subtype, speed, 64-bit compatibility and number of cores).
- Amount of installed RAM.
- User's preferred language.