Software engineer Oleksiy Krychevsky developed DiskSwell, a lightweight native utility for macOS that monitors abnormal file growth in real time and warns in advance about a lack of free space.
Software engineer Oleksiy Krychevsky developed DiskSwell, a lightweight native utility for macOS that monitors abnormal file growth in real time and warns in advance about a lack of free space.
The history of the tool's creation began with a typical but critical macOS problem. Alexey's MacBook had less than 1 GB of free space left, which caused the system to actually freeze after each work cycle. Standard tools like CleanMyMac, Mole, and the native macOS storage analyzer didn't give a clear answer as to where the space had gone. Even after disabling SIP and deleting heavy data for Apple's generative models, only about 30 GB was freed up, but the main memory eater remained unknown.
Alexey had to manually explore directory by directory using the console utility du. After five hours of fiddling, the cause was found: a 51 GB Safari WAL file. This was the second such incident in a year.
Realizing that spending half a day searching for abnormal files was not an appropriate approach, Oleksiy decided to automate this process. Thus, the idea was born to write a lightweight local monitoring tool that would track uncontrolled file growth in the background.
DiskSwell is an open-source utility for the macOS menu bar, designed on a detection-only basis. It does not delete files on its own, does not clean up databases, or close programs - its task is solely to detect the problem in time and notify the user.
Key features of the utility:
the utility is written natively for macOS, so it practically does not load the CPU, RAM, and does not waste battery power;
the tool monitors only a limited set of user directories via macOS system events, instead of a constant and heavy scan of the entire disk;
captures both a sudden spike in file size and slow growth over several days, singling out gigabyte-long Safari/WebKit WAL files;
all data is processed locally and stored in SQLite history. There is no telemetry, analytics, or accounting. The network is only used to check for updates via GitHub;
When an anomaly is detected, the utility shows the exact path to the file, its current size, growth dynamics, and the likely source application, allowing you to go to it in Finder with one click.
According to Alexey Krichevsky, DiskSwell was created to make the lives of Mac users a little easier and save them from having to search for "missing" gigabytes manually.
You can view the source code, learn more details, or download the utility on the project's GitHub page .
