See what's using your disk — and what removing it costs.
SpaceAudit is a storage analyser for macOS. It shows you where your space went, and before anything is removed it tells you what the item actually is, what specifically breaks if it goes, and what recovering it would take.
Nothing is deleted
SpaceAudit moves items to the Trash and nothing else. There is no
permanent-delete capability anywhere in the app. Emptying the Trash is always
your decision.
Your choice is remembered between launches. You can add or revoke folders at any time from the Overview.
The App Store version runs in Apple's sandbox, which means it can only read what you explicitly hand it. That is a hard limit of the platform, not a setting. The upside is that the app can never look anywhere you did not point it.
Same reason. Sandboxed apps cannot read /System,
/Library, /private or other user accounts under any
circumstances. In practice this matters less than it sounds: those directories
are mostly not reclaimable anyway, and the space you can actually recover —
caches, build artefacts, downloads, old backups — lives in your home folder.
No. Everything goes to the Trash. Anything riskier than a regenerable cache requires you to tick an acknowledgement naming the specific loss before the button becomes usable. Protected and system-owned paths are refused outright.
Open the Moved to Trash tab. It lists everything the app has removed, where it came from, and when. Use Put Back to restore an item to its original location. Put Back will not overwrite anything that has since appeared there — for caches, macOS often recreates the folder within seconds, so this comes up more than you would expect.
macOS keeps local Time Machine snapshots, and files you delete are still
referenced by any snapshot taken before the deletion. That space shows as
purgeable: not free yet, but released automatically as soon as something
needs it. It also ages out on its own, usually within a day. This is why Finder
and df often disagree about how full a disk is, and SpaceAudit
breaks the two figures out so the difference is visible rather than mysterious.
No. APFS lets files share storage, so a cloned file reports its full size
while occupying those blocks only once. Adding up file sizes therefore overshoots
— the du command has the same behaviour. Treat the figures as an
upper bound on what removal would free.
No. The app contains no networking code at all, so there is no mechanism by which it could send anything. No analytics, no accounts, no telemetry. See the privacy policy.
Questions, bug reports and feature requests: support@binarywaves.net
When reporting a problem, it helps to include your macOS version and what you had selected when it happened.