iHDViewer: A Visualization Tool for Tracking HD

Visualization techniques on hierarchical information have been proved their capability in presenting structured disk storage data. However, most existing techniques represented with simple visual methods such as pie chart or histogram, lacking the ability of grasping the usage of the computer. This paper presents a new interactive visualization technique named iHard Disk Viewer (iHDViewer), which aims to display file details and their movement histories, as well as predict the user's activities through visualization results. This tool mainly utilizes four different view panels to display the distribution of files and file folders for a computer system. Specifically, A tree view explains the general distribution of the whole disk storage; A river trend view tracks the files moving history, which is implemented by cubic spline interpolator with restricted boundary conditions to ensure the trend stability and information accuracy; We also use the concept of coordinate extension to visualize the file moving events which supports more intuitive results; A filelist view panel shows the details of the selected files; while a circle view panel interactively displays the status of files and file folders. In addition, considering the importance of human visual perception system in the data analyzing processes, we utilize three color design principles to work through all visual methods. Lastly, this paper demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our new idea to visually analyze computer FileSystems.