Storage Charts

Charts shows you what your two drives have been doing over time. Storage Studio snapshots free/used bytes per day and keeps the history on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded.

Time ranges

Seventeen pre-defined ranges from 24h through All time, selectable by chips at the top of the window. The last range you chose persists.

Dual axis

Internal SSD and external fast drive share one chart. Each gets its own colour and its own Y-scale so a 500 GB internal and a 4 TB external both read clearly without one dwarfing the other.

Drag-to-zoom and hover

Drag horizontally on the chart to zoom into a date range. Scroll inside the zoomed view to pan. Hover any point to see the exact byte count for that day.

Where did it go?

Under the chart is the answer to the question a chart alone can't settle — and the More menu ••• → Where did my space go? goes straight to it. Choose a period — or drag across the drop you're curious about — and Storage Studio breaks down that exact window: what grew, what was freed, what Storage Studio itself did, and how much it couldn't account for.

Two rules it never breaks. Nothing is scaled to make the figures add up neatly; whatever can't be explained is shown as its own line. And a partial answer is never presented as a complete one — if the period reaches back before something started being measured, it says so at the top.

Space held by automatic backups, named

This used to be one of the biggest things the breakdown couldn't explain — which was odd, because Storage Studio could see it perfectly well on another screen. It's now a line of its own, shown whenever your Mac is holding anything, with a Release that space action beside it. That's the option that actually helps when deleting files hasn't.

Two different numbers, said out loud

There are two ways to count free space on a Mac: the one Finder shows, which counts space held in automatic backups as though it were free, and the amount your Mac would really hand out right now. The chart draws the first; the breakdown works from the second, because that's the one that decides whether you can save a file. Where they differ, the panel says so and gives you both rather than quietly picking one.

Why free space can go down after a clean-up that worked

When something is moved or removed, your Mac makes a backup reference to what was there — so the space you just freed can be held again almost immediately, in proportion to how much moved. It looks exactly like a failure and isn't. Storage Studio says so at the moment it happens, and only when it has actually measured that your Mac is holding a meaningful amount.

Releasing held space is a request, not a command

Your Mac decides what it can let go of. Release that space asks, measures what actually came back, and tells you which of three things happened: the space is yours again, some of it is on its way, or your Mac kept hold of it for now — in which case it usually returns on its own within about a day. Nothing you still have is deleted either way, and the third outcome is never dressed up as success.

Over long periods — weeks rather than a day — Storage Studio may not be able to separate held space from the rest, because the older readings it kept didn't record it. It says so for those periods instead of guessing, and it improves on its own as newer readings replace the old ones.

A watch on your free space

Storage Studio checks how much room is left on your built-in drive every half minute. The check costs almost nothing — nothing is scanned, and nothing is read from your disk — so it can safely run all the time; only when the number actually moves does anything else happen.

It warns on the rate, not the size. A large drop isn't news on a drive with plenty of room left, and a smaller one is urgent when there isn't much, so Storage Studio weighs how fast space is going against how much you have and tells you roughly how many days of room you have left at this rate. You hear about real trouble early, and you don't hear about ordinary downloads, updates and builds.

Notices name the app when it can be identified, hedge when a folder only looks like it belongs to one, and say plainly when they couldn't tell — a name is never invented to fill the gap. It's one notice per situation, never one per file, and you can mark a source as expected so it stops being mentioned. If the space moved because one of Storage Studio's own jobs was running, the notice says that instead of alarming you.

Export

Right-click the chart and choose Export PNG… to drop a high-DPI image somewhere — handy for support tickets. Export CSV saves the full history as a spreadsheet-ready file.

Retention

About a year of history is kept, and older entries are trimmed automatically. If you want to keep an archive, export to CSV periodically.