What is Ximinez?

Ximinez is a disk usage analyzer and comparator. It enables you to take snapshots of disk usage for a given folder, to browse through the snapshot and to view differences between snapshots. It is aimed towards solving problems like: "Why is my disk suddenly so full when it was OK just recently?". With Ximinez you can compare an old snapshot with a current one and this way quickly find where all those missing gigabytes went.

Besides the GUI, the package also includes an optional command line tool, which can be for example used in conjunction with a scheduler to take snapshots on a regular basis.

Why bother?

The need for such software comes from our server administration experience. Often you have to not just identify the biggest folders, but also to find which folders suddenly grew beyond reason. There are many similar programs, but to our knowledge, none of them focuses on differences, they only display usage. Also most of them are windows only, not to mention the absence of a command line tool and possibility to analyze the disk usage offline.

The software was designed with simplicity in mind. I guess nobody's going to use it every day, so it has to be simple, otherwise you'll have to learn it each and every time. On the other hand, Ximinez can be used by professionals - they can put it in a cron job and only run the GUI from time to time (or when there is a problem of course).

Supported platforms

Portability shouldn't be a big issue, since Ximinez was written in Python, using the excellent cross-platform wxPython GUI toolkit. Debian 4.0 (Etch), Ubuntu 8.10, Windows XP and Windows 2000 are already tested and supported. The windows installer should also work on all Windows versions since Windows 2000. The Debian package should work on all debian-like systems, including recent enough versions of Python and wxPython (see below). Other UNIX-like platforms are supported via a generic INSTALL script (found in the source package), which should hopefully work on most of them. This also applies to Mac OS X; Ximinez has been reported to run there.

Thanks to the py2exe project, the Win32 installer already includes Python as well as wxPython, so there's nothing to worry about. Just install and run it. The Debian packages have the dependencies properly defined, so they should also work out of the box. However, to use the source package, you have to make sure Python is installed; you need version 2.4 or newer. You also need wxPython, version 2.6 or newer, except if you only plan on using the command line interface (ximinezcli). As of version 0.7, you also need the Paramiko library.