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Cover image for DiskGeek: a free, no-bloat disk space analyzer for Windows
Andrew Armstrong
Andrew Armstrong

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DiskGeek: a free, no-bloat disk space analyzer for Windows

Hi DEV! I built DiskGeek because I was tired of disk-analyzer tools that were either abandoned, bundled with adware, or missing the one feature I actually wanted: near-duplicate detection via perceptual hashing, not just exact-match.

It's a free, self-contained Windows tool (Avalonia UI on .NET 8) that does:

  • List view + treemap view of what's eating your space
  • Exact and near-duplicate file detection (perceptual hashing for images)
  • Full-text search across scan results
  • Batch rename
  • Snapshot comparison — see what changed on a drive over time
  • Scheduled scans

No installer bloat, no bundled offers, no telemetry, no "Pro" upsell — it's just free. Windows 10/11, 64-bit only right now.

Why I built it

Most of the disk-space tools I tried fell into one of three buckets: unmaintained for years, wrapped in an installer that tries to change your default browser, or capable of finding exact duplicate files but not near-duplicates — which matters a lot if you've got a folder of photos exported from three different apps with slightly different compression each time.

DiskGeek's duplicate detection uses perceptual hashing for images, so it can flag visually similar files even when the bytes don't match exactly.

Tech stack

DiskGeek is built with Avalonia UI on .NET 8, which made it straightforward to keep the app self-contained (no separate runtime install needed) while still getting native performance for scanning large drives.

Links

Happy to answer questions about the build, the perceptual-hashing approach to duplicate detection, or anything else. Feedback is very welcome — especially if you try it on a messy drive and it finds something useful.

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