Mac Deficit

Where did my space go? A disk space analyzer for the Mac, by RawData Studio. Its own site: macdeficit.com.

Mac Deficit shows you, the moment it opens, what is filling your Mac's drive, and lets you clear it safely. It is built for Macs on Apple Silicon, and for anyone who has watched a 256 GB or 512 GB drive fill up and found macOS's own Storage panel no help. Version 1.0 is out: buy it at macdeficit.com. The Mac App Store edition is next.

• See it at once: your main drive's health the moment the app opens, external drives a click away
• The Apple Treemap: your drive drawn as an apple, the blocks inside it the folders and files eating its space. The bigger the block, the bigger the deficit
• Go deeper with a click: into any folder, block by block, or as a sorted list
• Act with confidence: Reveal in Finder, or move to the Trash after you see exactly how much space it gives back. Nothing is deleted for good without asking
• Private by design: everything stays on your Mac. No accounts, no analytics, no telemetry

Mac Deficit 1.0 runs on Macs with Apple Silicon and macOS 14 or later, and is on sale at macdeficit.com: $3.99 for you, or $9.99 for a household of up to three. A Mac App Store version is with Apple for review.

• Pick a drive: every drive on the Mac shown as an apple, filled as far as the drive is used, with its name, capacity and free space as Finder shows them, and when you last scanned it; or any folder, with the ones you scanned lately one click away. Plug in or eject a drive and the list follows
• Scan it fast: every processor core reads the drive at once; the drive's apple fills as the scan reads it, with how much has been counted and Cancel; a whole internal drive of 1.9 million files and folders in about eight seconds
• Trust the numbers: sizes are the space files really take, with hard-linked files and copies that share their space (Finder's Duplicate) counted once, and other drives left out; macOS's own data is counted, so a whole-drive scan adds up; drives formatted APFS, Mac OS Extended, exFAT or FAT (MS-DOS) all measured as Finder does
• See where the rest went: after scanning a whole drive, a button at the bottom shows what was found of the drive's used space and opens the rest: macOS's own volumes, what could not be read, and the purgeable space macOS frees when it needs room, Time Machine's local snapshots among it
• Browse what you found: folders and files largest first, a breadcrumb back out, Reveal in Finder
• Find anything: type a name and see every match below the folder you are in, largest first, with where each one is and the space they take together; pick a kind (folders, files, videos, documents and more) to narrow it, or a kind alone to see the largest of that kind anywhere on the drive. Open what you found, see it in its folder, or move it to the Trash
• Clear space safely: move files and folders to the Trash from the list or the apple, one or several at once, their total size shown first; put them back with one click. Or delete them immediately from the File menu when you are sure, with the size first and Return cancelling; when another name or copy still holds a file's data, the app says so, whether it goes to the Trash or is deleted, and how much space it really frees. When something inside a folder could not be read, the confirmation says "At least" and how many items it could not measure. What your Mac needs, and what macOS privacy protects (your contacts, calendars, notes, the Photos library), is never offered, and the app says why
• See it as an apple: the Apple Treemap beside the list, a shaded apple with a stem and a leaf, filled with a cell for each folder and file, the biggest in its body and the smallest toward the tip, folders coloured by what fills them, names on the cells wherever they fit; hover for the details, click to go inside. While a folder is being laid out, a pale apple with a soft light passing over it, and the cells fade in. When you move something to the Trash, the other cells stay where they were and grow into its space
• Know your drive: while a drive is scanned, see what it is (its model, how it is connected, its format, how many items it holds), its space, and how fast it is reading and writing; afterwards it is all in the space button with what the drive read and wrote during the scan
• Stay up to date: change something in Finder after a scan, put a folder back from the Trash, and the app notices: one click on Refresh catches up without scanning everything again, showing how far it got, with Cancel. If the folder you scanned is moved or deleted, the app says so. It speaks up only when enough has changed, so macOS writing its logs and caches all the time does not set it off
• See what you removed: a history of everything the app moved to the Trash, deleted or put back, kept on your Mac until you clear it; see whether each item is still in the Trash, put it back from there, or save the history as a spreadsheet
• Grant Full Disk Access: the app explains why it helps and opens the right page of System Settings, or carries on with limited access and lists what it could not read
• Make it yours: Settings for light or dark, sizes in decimal units as Finder or binary units as Terminal, and the recent scans it keeps; the window and the list's width stay as you left them
• Use it with VoiceOver: the drives, the list, every cell of the apple and every action have spoken labels
• Know when something went wrong: if the app ever stops unexpectedly, it says so the next time it opens and shows you the report, which stays on your Mac; it tells you what the report holds before you share it, and its own reports name none of your files
• Check for updates when you choose: Mac Deficit › Check for Updates… says whether a newer version is out; it asks only when you choose it, and sends nothing about you or your Mac
• See what it is built with: Mac Deficit › Acknowledgements lists the open-source code inside the app, each with its licence and a link to its source

• Swift and SwiftUI for the interface, the Apple Treemap and macOS itself
• Rust (2024 edition) for the scanner: its own parallel walk over macOS's getattrlistbulk, which reads a folder's entries in batches
• UniFFI to connect the two: the Swift app calls the Rust scanner directly, in the same process
• Everything on device: no network, no telemetry