DaisyDisk 4.34.2 admin Mac

Up to 2 TB scan targets are supported, no matter if the drive is internal, external, or a network volume. DaisyDisk builds a color-coded sunburst map from the scan data, letting you hover over any segment to see the file name and size, then drill down with a click. The map is the marquee feature, but the tools an experienced user reaches for sit just behind it. A collector panel at the bottom catches files you flag for deletion, with a manual purge triggered only when you drag them out or tap the delete key.

The scanner is tuned for APFS volumes. As of version 4.34, the app identifies APFS clones and counts only the first occurrence toward the used-space total, so a file copied a dozen times through the Finder no longer tricks the map into reporting a dozen times the footprint. The "Other" storage category that System Information reports as an opaque gray bar is broken apart inside DaisyDisk, showing exactly which caches, logs, and support files fill that space. For volumes formatted with FAT32 or exFAT, size estimation was corrected in an earlier update, and hidden-space estimation accuracy improved alongside it. The interface runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs and draws the map at Retina resolution. Eleven interface languages are included, among them Russian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and French.

What a cleanup session actually looks like

You launch the app and it presents a single window with your mounted volumes listed down the left side. Click the boot drive. The scan runs and finishes in under forty seconds on a modern SSD — the progress bar fills, then the sunburst map unfurls from the center outward, each arc proportional to the folder it represents.

The outer ring is where the big stuff lives. You hover over a fat blue segment and a tooltip reads /Users/yourname/Movies/screencapture-2025.mov — 14.7 GB. You had no idea it was still there. A click drills into that folder, redrawing the map with its contents. You find two more screen recordings from last winter, both north of ten gigs. You drag the first one to the collector at the bottom of the window. A red badge ticks up: one file, 14.7 GB queued. You drag the other two down as well. The collector shows 38 GB across three files. You press Delete, confirm the dialog, and the space is free before you close the window.

Next you click a wedge labeled "Library" and follow it into Application Support. A developer tool you uninstalled two years ago left a 6 GB cache folder behind. DaisyDisk shows it sitting there, untouched since 2024. It joins the collector. The whole session — scan, identify, delete — takes under three minutes. No terminal commands, no guesswork about what a folder name means.

Clearing a photo library for archival, step by step

Say you want to archive a 200 GB Photos library but keep only the originals that matter. The library bundle is a black box to the Finder, but DaisyDisk opens it.

Step one: Scan the drive that holds the library. When the map appears, locate the .photoslibrary bundle and double-click to enter it.

Step two: Inside, the map splits into folders like originals, resources, and private. The originals folder is the largest segment by far. Drill into it.

Step three: Sort the file list by size — the right-hand panel lets you toggle between the map and a flat list view. The list shows every image file, ranked. You spot a batch of RAW files from a single shoot: 42 files, each around 55 MB, totalling 2.3 GB. The client has the finals already.

Step four: Select the batch in the list. Press Space to invoke Quick Look — the preview confirms they are the unprocessed RAWs. Drag them to the collector, then delete.

Step five: Work through the library this way for fifteen minutes: old bursts, duplicate edits, exported JPEGs you saved back into the library by mistake. The map shrinks visibly. When you close DaisyDisk, the library bundle has dropped to 142 GB and fits comfortably on the external SSD you use for cold storage.

Video editors hunting render caches and proxy piles

Three groups stand out.

Video editors and motion designers who juggle multiple project folders. Render caches, proxy files, and unlabelled exports pile up inside project directories. DaisyDisk lets them scan a project drive, spot a 90 GB Cache folder inside an After Effects project from six months ago, and delete it without opening the host application or hunting through the Finder.

Mac users with 256 GB or 512 GB internal drives — especially those on Apple Silicon laptops where storage upgrades are expensive and fixed at purchase. The "Other" slice in System Information is a stress trigger. DaisyDisk breaks it into concrete, actionable items: old iOS backups, Mail.app attachment caches, Spotify offline storage, Xcode simulator data. A user who needs a daisy disk download because their drive has been warning them for weeks will find the relief is immediate once they see what is actually eating the space.

IT support staff and family tech helpers who manage other people's Macs. They can run a scan, send a screenshot of the map, and explain over the phone exactly which folders to target. The visual map communicates disk usage to non-technical users faster than any list of folder sizes ever could.

Quick Look previews files without leaving the scan

DaisyDisk does not try to be a Swiss Army knife. It handles one task — showing what uses disk space — and leans on the system for the rest.

Quick Look integration is the most practical tie-in. Any file visible in the map or the list view responds to the Space bar with the same preview panel the Finder provides. A .psd shows its canvas, a .mkv starts playing, a .pages document renders its first page. You never need to open another app to verify what a file is before you delete it. The collector itself works with standard drag and drop, so you can pull files from the DaisyDisk map directly into a Finder window, a Terminal session, or the trash.

Parallel scanning handles external drives independently. If you have a Thunderbolt RAID, a USB-C SSD, and your internal drive all connected, DaisyDisk scans them simultaneously rather than queuing them. Each scan runs in its own tab, and the map redraws for whichever tab is active. The app also reads disk mount events in real time — plug in a drive mid-session and it appears in the sidebar without a restart.

For users who pair DaisyDisk with backup tools like Carbon Copy Cloner or Time Machine, the APFS clone awareness introduced in version 4.34 matters a lot. A cloned file on an APFS volume occupies physical space only once. DaisyDisk counts it once, so the map matches what the file system actually consumes. A user running a daisydisk torrent that bundles an older version can check the release notes and update to the latest build to get accurate clone accounting.

The app also complements system-level tools like tmutil and the Storage Management pane. Where System Information says "System Data: 87 GB" and stops, DaisyDisk shows that 32 GB of it is local Time Machine snapshots and another 18 GB is a forgotten Steam library inside ~/Library/Application Support. You still use tmutil to thin snapshots if you want to, but now you know which button to press.

Version 4.34.2 squashes a scanning bug that appeared on systems running macOS releases prior to Sonoma. It also introduces support for APFS clones: the scanner now recognizes clone files and counts only the first occurrence of each clone toward total used space, so the visual map reflects actual storage consumption.

• macOS 10.13 or later
• Apple Silicon or 64-bit Intel processor