Monitor hard drive usage history?

On Mavericks, is there a way to monitor hard drive use history?

To be clear, I do not only want to know how much space I am using on my hard drive. I would like a history of my hard drive space usage over time.

  • Is there a feature built into Maverick that would allow me to do that? Or any additional app?

  • If there is, will this built-in feature/app be able to recover information from my past use, or will it only start to record my usage once I set it up?

I know that I could record my usage manually, but I'd rather have it done automatically.

EDIT : as far as the frequency of observations is concerned, I'd be satisfied with something ranging from every day to once a week.


Solution 1:

How about something simple in your crontab?

@daily (date; df)>> ~/drive_usage.log

Which will, on a daily basis, append to the file drive_usage.log in your home directory with the date and time the job ran. Change @daily to @hourly or @weekly if you want different sampling rates.

Sample output:

Thu 13 Feb 2014 22:15:22 GMT
Filesystem                                             512-blocks       Used  Available Capacity   iused      ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk1                                              487900160  332696088  154692072    69%  41651009   19336509   68%   /
devfs                                                         382        382          0   100%       661          0  100%   /dev
map -hosts                                                      0          0          0   100%         0          0  100%   /net
map auto_home                                                   0          0          0   100%         0          0  100%   /home
/dev/disk4                                             1952177496  322984856 1629192640    17%  40373105  203649080   17%   /Volumes/Samsung Time Machine
//paul@calliope._afpovertcp._tcp.local/paul%60s%20home 7689113744 6353779112 1335334632    83% 794222387  166916829   83%   /Volumes/paul's home
//paul@pollux/paul                                      125522808   65564368   59958440    53%         0 18446744073709551615    0%   /Volumes/paul

If you want more information you might want to use something like fs_usage(1) which provides a truly astonishing amount of detail and must be run as root.

Solution 2:

Munin is available for Mac OS X. It is server monitoring software and one of the things it monitors is disk space usage.

Munin Mac install docs here.

(Yes, this is a rather heavyweight solution, but you get graphing! :)