Drive Sonar

Drive Sonar is a fast, lightweight desktop disk usage explorer and analyzer built with Tauri v2, Rust, React, and TypeScript.

Drive Sonar is inspired by the simplicity of ncdu. Drive Sonar offers different visualizations to help you gain a better idea of your disk usage.

Drive Sonar runs entirely in user mode—no admin mode or elevated privilege is required to scan even the most protected corners of your disk. It's also fully open source, so you can see exactly what it's doing and build it yourself if you'd rather not trust a binary.

• Fast Parallel Scanning: Native fast-path scanning on Windows and a multi-threaded fallback for other platforms
• Interactive Visualizations:
  • Space Distribution Map: High-performance storage treemap
  • Extension Breakdown: Top file extensions by storage utilization
  • File Age Analysis: Scatter plot visualizing file size vs. age
• In-App File Management: Open files or folders directly in native OS file managers or safely move items to system trash (requires confirmation + additional background safety checks)
• Local-Only Stats: A lifetime total of what you moved to the Trash is kept in the app's local storage on your device, with no network use and no telemetry; reset it anytime from the About dialog
• Print Scan Report: Not just identify what's causing high disk usage, but also export a report for the future reference
• Security Hardened: Path canonicalization guards against relative traversal, strict Content Security Policy (CSP), and system root deletion protection
• No Admin Required: Runs entirely in user mode, unlike many disk analyzers that need elevated privileges to scan protected directories
• Open Source: Apache 2.0 licensed—inspect the code, fork it, or build it yourself

Primarily, this started as a hands-on project to learn Rust and Tauri. But it's also grown into something I actually reach for: Windows' native storage view is fairly high-level, and I wanted something like ncdu, but with a GUI—fast and minimal, insightful without visual clutter, and one that doesn't demand admin rights just to tell me where my disk space went.

Pre-built binaries are available on the Releases page. Download the installer for your platform, run it, and you're good to go—no build step required.

Note: The Windows installer isn't code-signed yet, so you'll likely see a Windows SmartScreen warning ("Windows protected your PC") on first run. This is just because the binary doesn't carry a paid publisher certificate—it's not a sign of malware. Click More info → Run anyway to proceed. Signing is on the radar for a future release.

On Windows, Drive Sonar requires Windows 10 version 1709 (October 2017 Update) or later. macOS and Linux have no additional version requirement.

• Node.js (v18+)
• Rust (stable toolchain)

Install dependencies:

npm install

Run the application in development mode:

npm run tauri dev

Build the optimized desktop binary:

npm run tauri build

First, ensure all project dependencies (including test libraries) are installed:

npm install

Run frontend unit tests with Vitest:

npm test

To generate frontend code coverage reports:

npm run test:coverage

Run backend Rust unit tests:

cargo test --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml

To generate code coverage reports, install cargo-tarpaulin (if not already installed) and run:

cargo tarpaulin --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml --ignore-tests

To create a new release:

1. Bump Version: Set the same version number (e.g., 0.4.0 -> 0.5.0) in:
   • package.json ("version")
   • src-tauri/tauri.conf.json ("version")
   • src-tauri/Cargo.toml (version under [package]) Update package-lock.json with npm install --package-lock-only after changing package.json.
2. Merge to main: Commit changes, raise a PR, and merge into main. Release Drafter uses the version in src-tauri/tauri.conf.json for the draft's name, tag, and changelog link.
3. Tag & Push: Checkout the latest main, confirm the version files and draft agree, and push v<version> matching src-tauri/tauri.conf.json:

   git checkout main
   git pull origin main
   git tag v0.5.0
   git push origin v0.5.0

4. Publish Release: Pushing the v* tag triggers the GitHub Actions workflow, which checks that the tag matches the Tauri version before building binaries across platforms and attaching them to the same draft release. Review the notes and binaries, then publish the draft.

Find out more about Drive Sonar:

• Drive Sonar Live Demo
• WinDirStat vs WizTree vs Drive Sonar: Which Free Disk Space Analyzer Should You Use in 2026?

Drive Sonar is open-source software, released under the Apache 2.0 license.