Baseline Icon

Discover Baseline

Baseline helps you discover what is taking up space on your Computer's hard disk.

As well as telling you the size of each file or folder, Baseline also allows you to compare your disk against the result of previous scans, so that you can see which files and folders have grown or been added, or shrunk or been deleted.

The screenshot below shows the Baseline window immediately after startup.

The Baseline Window

The pane on the left shows the mounted Volumes on this Computer.

The directory tree on the right shows the folders and files for the currently selected Volume.

Items that are shown in purple are referenced in Apple or non-Apple software packages that have been installed on your system. You may want to be careful about deleting or modifying these files. The tooltip for the item will show you what packages it is referenced by.

Items whose name is shown in italics, such as the /etc folder, are symbolic links. The tooltip for the item shows the item that the link refers to.

You can open an item in the Finder by double-clicking on it, or use Get Info to show the Finder's information panel for the item.

You can also see view the current volume in a Browser view, as shown in the screenshot below. Use the View toolbar item or the Browser View/Directory Tree View items in the Volume menu to switch between views.

The Baseline Window

Scanning

A scan can be started from the toolbar, or by double-clicking on the Volume to be scanned. The screenshot below shows the Baseline window during a scan.

Running A Scan

The directories that are being scanned are colored red. The sizes of the scanned items are shown the Size column (the tooltip for each item will show you the exact size in bytes).

Saving your first Baseline

When the first scan for a writable volume is complete, you will be offered the chance to save the results as a baseline.

Running A Scan

Once the baseline is saved, it will be listed in the Baseline menu in the toolbar. The currently selected baseline will automatically be compared against a completed scan.

You can save later scans by using the Save Baseline toolbar item, or the Save item in the File Menu.

Comparing scan results against previous baselines

The real power of baseline comes from allowing you to see what's changed on your disk.

The screenshot below shows a completed scan, compared against a previous baseline. The Change column indicates which files have changed, and by how much.

Running A Scan

To make it even easier to see what's changed, you can use the "Changes Only" item in the Toolbar to show only the changed items, as in the screenshot below.

Baseline Comparison

Now that the scan is complete, you can also view your disk in the TreeMap view, or use the Compress, Archive, and Delete toolbar items to free up space on your hard disk.

See also

The Browser view
The TreeMap view
Deleting, Compressing, and Archiving items