DaisyDisk 4.34.2 admin — Mac version

Does the sunburst map actually help find big files?

Yes. Instead of a long list, you get a colour-coded map you can click through. Each segment represents a folder or file, so you zoom straight into the spot that's hogging your drive without guessing.

Cloned files only count once toward used space

Version 4.34 added proper clone counting. If a file is cloned in several places, DaisyDisk counts only the first occurrence when calculating used space. No more panic over phantom duplicates eating up your reported free space.

Can I peek inside a file before I delete it?

You can. It hooks into Quick Look, so pressing the Space bar gives you a proper preview of the document's contents. It's a good safety net to make sure you aren't binning the wrong invoice or photo.

Does it speak your language?

A stalled scan usually means a permissions block

Sometimes DaisyDisk refuses to scan a folder and just sits there. Nine times out of ten that's a permissions thing — macOS blocks access to certain system folders by default. Pop into System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access and add DaisyDisk. The scan should fly through next time.

Another one: the app says a drive has far less free space than Finder reports. That's often APFS snapshots hanging around from Time Machine local backups. You can list them in Terminal with tmutil listlocalsnapshots / and thin them out if needed. DaisyDisk itself doesn't delete snapshots, but at least you'll know where the mystery gigabytes went.

If the app won't open and you grabbed a daisydisk mac free copy from a friend, Gatekeeper might block it with a blunt "damaged" message. The fix is quick: open Terminal, type xattr -cr followed by a space, drag the app into the Terminal window, then hit Return. That strips the quarantine flag and it'll launch fine.

On older spinning hard drives the initial scan can feel sluggish. Let it finish — the interactive map only works properly once the full scan is done. An SSD will zip through in seconds, but a 2TB external spinner might need a cuppa tea.

Deleted files still land in the Trash for recovery

DaisyDisk doesn't try to replace Finder. It hands off the actual deleting to Finder's trash system, so anything you bin through the map still ends up in the Trash and can be pulled back if you acted too fast. It respects the same rules your Mac already uses.

Quick Look integration is the obvious one — tap the Space bar on any segment and you get the same preview pane that Finder gives you. Works for images, PDFs, text files, even some video formats.

It also plays nicely with Spotlight. When you find a folder that's ballooning and you want to dig deeper outside the map, drag the folder name from DaisyDisk's breadcrumb bar straight into a Spotlight search window. Handy for tracking down files by name that the map lumps together by location.

If you use daisydisk torrent downloads to keep the app updated, you'll find it sits comfortably alongside other cleanup tools too. It doesn't fight with Onyx or CleanMyMac — it just scans, shows, and gets out of the way. No background daemons, no login items to unpick later.

Clearing 2TB of raw files and Lightroom exports

Lena shoots weddings and her 2TB SSD has been nagging her with "disk almost full" warnings for a fortnight. She's got Lightroom catalogs, exported JPEG folders for clients, and a growing pile of raw files she hasn't culled yet.

She fires up DaisyDisk — maybe from a DaisyDisk Mac torrent a fellow photographer passed her — and scans the drive. The sunburst map lights up with one massive segment: a folder called 2024 RAWs unsorted she'd dumped three months ago and forgotten. Inside, she spots a subfolder of burst shots from a single confetti exit. Seven hundred raw files, near-identical, eating 38GB.

She Quick Looks a few to confirm they're the same split-second sequence, then drags the whole subfolder to the trash from right inside the map. Just like that, her drive breathes again. The best bit? She didn't have to open Lightroom or navigate Finder's endless column view. She saw the shape of the problem and fixed it in under five minutes.

Afterwards she scans a couple of older backup drives too, just to see what's lurking. One has a forgotten Final Cut library from 2022 — 147GB of render files she'll never need again. DaisyDisk spots it where Finder's "sort by size" would have taken ages to bubble it up.

It's got a solid set, including Russian, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Polish, French, Swedish, and Japanese.

• Fixes a bug from the previous release.
• Adds support for APFS clones, counting only the first occurrence in space calculations.

• macOS 10.13 or newer
• Works on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs