Clawback

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Clawback shows where your disk space went. It scans a drive or folder and draws it as a treemap, where each file is a box sized by how much space it uses, nested inside boxes for its folders. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with a desktop app and a terminal mode.

Releases · User guide · Building · License (MIT-0)

Get it: download the latest release for Windows, macOS, or Linux, or install it from crates.io with Rust 1.95 or newer:

cargo install clawback

The crates.io build uses your system's Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts, while the release downloads include their own.

Screenshots use a built-in demo drive; the file names and sizes are made up.

Features

• Treemap of a drive or folder, with a size-sorted directory tree and a breakdown by file extension for the selected folder.
• Double-click a folder to zoom into it. Back, Escape, and the mouse Back button return to previous views.
• The map is usable while the scan is running, and scans can be paused and resumed.
• After a scan finishes, Clawback watches for filesystem changes and updates the map, so deleted or moved files disappear without a rescan.
• Open files, view properties, or move items to the Recycle Bin / Trash from the right-click menu. Deletion can be turned off in Settings.
• Ten color palettes, an option to mute them, and settings for map density, tooltips, and how sizes are counted.
• Interface translated into 31 languages.

Install

Download a build from Releases.

• Windows: run clawback.exe.
• macOS: drag Clawback.app into Applications.
• Linux: run clawback. See the user guide for adding a desktop launcher.

Then choose File → Open folder and pick a drive or folder.

To build from source, see docs/development.md.

Terminal mode

clawback                       # desktop app
clawback --tui .               # interactive treemap in the terminal
clawback --report --top 10 .   # print a text summary, 10 entries per section

The terminal interface supports browsing, zooming, and live updates, but not file actions. --report works in scripts and with redirected output. See the command-line reference for all options.

How scanning works

• Windows: scanning a whole NTFS volume as administrator reads the Master File Table directly, which is much faster than walking directories. Other scans walk the directory tree and estimate disk usage from file sizes rounded up to the cluster size.
• macOS: directory metadata is read in batches with getattrlistbulk, falling back to ordinary directory reads on filesystems that don't support it. No administrator access is needed.
• All platforms: the directory scanner adjusts how many threads it uses based on measured throughput and latency.

Clawback only counts what your account can read and lists the folders it couldn't. It doesn't follow symlinks or Windows junctions. Permissions and size accounting are covered in the user guide.

Run it in a browser with Docker

For a NAS or home server, the Docker image runs Clawback on the server and streams it to a browser tab. Map the folders you want to look at under /data. You can delete from folders mapped read/write; folders mapped read-only can be browsed but never deleted from.

services:
  clawback:
    image: ghcr.io/azazel-labs/clawback:latest
    shm_size: 1gb
    ports:
      - 3001:3001
    environment:
      - PASSWORD=change-me
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - /srv/media:/data/media
      - /mnt/backups:/data/backups:ro
    restart: unless-stopped

Run docker compose up -d, then open https://<server>:3001. Running Clawback in Docker covers TSDProxy, GPU acceleration, and the other options.

Contributing

Build instructions and project layout are in docs/development.md. Translations are maintained in Git; CI requires complete catalogs and localized READMEs reviewed against the current English sources. Maintainers can find the release process in docs/releases.md.

License

Copyright © 2026 Azazel Labs. Released under MIT-0.