Space Cowboy Help

1. Overview

Space Cowboy is a disk-space visualizer for Windows. It scans a drive and draws an interactive radial map (a “radial graph”) where the size of every file and folder is shown at a glance, so you can find what's eating your storage and clear it out in a few clicks.

What makes it fast

On NTFS drives, Space Cowboy reads the volume's Master File Table (MFT) directly instead of walking folders one by one. A full system drive typically scans in a few seconds.

What you can do

• See your whole drive as a single, navigable picture.
• Drill into any folder to see what's inside.
• Queue files into a Holding Pen and recycle or permanently delete them.
• Stay safe with built-in guardrails that protect system files.

2. Getting started

Installing

1. Run the Space Cowboy installer and follow the prompts.
2. On the final screen, click Launch App to open Space Cowboy, or start it later from the Start Menu or Desktop shortcut.

The first scan & the security prompt

When you scan an NTFS drive, Windows shows a User Account Control (UAC) prompt asking for administrator permission. This is expected and necessary: reading the raw volume requires elevated rights.

3. Scanning a drive

On launch you'll see the prompt “To get started please pick a drive to scan” next to the Drives ▾ button in the top-left.

1. Click Drives ▾ to open the drive drawer.
2. Each drive shows an icon (internal disk, USB, or memory card), its letter and file system, a usage bar (used vs. total), and free space.
3. Click Scan on the drive you want. A sweeping bar shows progress, and the header reads “Scanning C:\…” while it works.

4. Reading the ring

The radial graph is the heart of Space Cowboy. Here's how to read it:

Hovering any segment brightens it and fills the detail bar at the bottom of the window. Very thin items aren't drawn as segments (they'd be too small to click) — but you'll always find them in the contents panel on the right.

5. Navigating & details

Drilling in and out

• Click a folder segment to drill into it — it animates to the center and becomes the new focus.
• Use the breadcrumb trail below the header (e.g. C:\ › Users › jorda › AppData › Local) to jump back to any parent folder. The current folder is highlighted.

The detail bar

Hover any segment (or any row in the contents list) to see its details along the bottom of the window:

• Size on disk — space actually allocated.
• Logical — the file's nominal size.
• % of focus — its share of the current folder.
• Type — file or folder, and child count for folders.
• Tags — special attributes such as 🔒 protected (see Item tags).

6. The contents panel

The right-hand panel lists everything in the current folder, ranked largest first. Each row has a colored dot matching its wedge in the ring.

• Click a folder row to drill into it.
• Hover a row to highlight its segment in the ring and show its details.
• Drag a row (or Shift+click it) to add it to the Holding Pen.
• Right-click a row for the full options menu.

The list scrolls, and a trailing “N smaller items” row accounts for anything beyond the top entries.

7. The Holding Pen

The Holding Pen (lower-right) is a staging area for things you want to remove. Build up a batch, review the total, then delete it all at once.

Adding items

• Drag a segment from the ring (or a row from the contents list) onto the Holding Pen.
• Shift+click a segment or row.
• Right-click → Add to Holding Pen.

The Holding Pen shows each item, a running total of space you'll reclaim, and a clear link. Click any collected item to remove it from the list.

8. Deleting files

You can delete from the Holding Pen (in a batch) or directly via right-click.

Recycle vs. permanent

The 5-second safety countdown

Either delete starts a 5-second countdown with a Cancel button. Nothing is removed until the countdown finishes, so you always have a moment to back out.

After a delete, the ring updates instantly. If you delete the very folder you're viewing, Space Cowboy automatically moves up to the nearest surviving parent.

Right-click menu

Right-clicking any segment or list row opens a menu with:

• Add to Holding Pen
• Recycle
• Delete permanently
• Reveal in Explorer — opens the item's folder in Windows Explorer with it selected.
• Open with default app — opens a file in its associated program.

9. Safety guardrails

Space Cowboy refuses to delete anything that would damage Windows or wipe your whole account, and warns you about other risky items. These checks are enforced by the app itself — they can't be bypassed by accident.

Protected — deletion blocked

Items marked 🔒 protected cannot be collected or deleted. Delete options for them are disabled. This covers:

• Drive roots (C:\, etc.)
• The Windows, Program Files, and ProgramData folders (and everything inside them)
• The Users folder, any user's profile folder, and Public
• System files such as pagefile.sys, hiberfil.sys, and $Recycle.Bin

Caution — allowed, but flagged

Items marked ⚠ personal data can be deleted, but Space Cowboy warns you first — at collect time, in the menu, and again before the countdown. This covers your AppData, personal folders (Documents, Downloads, Desktop, Pictures, …), and an old Windows.old install.

10. Item tags

When you hover an item, the detail bar may show one or more tags:

11. How it works

The privilege split (why there's a helper)

Reading a drive's raw file table requires administrator rights — but you don't want a large, complex app running as admin. So Space Cowboy splits the job:

• The main app (the window you interact with) runs with normal user rights.
• A small, focused helper — spacecowboy-broker.exe — runs elevated for the scan, reads the volume, streams the data back over a private channel locked to your account, and exits.

This is a “least-privilege” design: only the tiny, auditable helper ever touches the disk with admin rights. The helper has no window and no shortcut, and does nothing if run on its own — it's safe to ignore.

Live updates

While a scan is open, Space Cowboy watches the drive's change journal, so files created or removed by other programs are reflected in the ring without a full rescan.

Your data stays local

Space Cowboy reads your disk on your machine. It has no network features and sends nothing anywhere.

12. Mouse & keyboard reference

13. Troubleshooting

“Elevation was declined” or the scan won't start

NTFS scans need the administrator prompt. If you dismissed it, click Scan again and choose Yes on the UAC dialog.

Windows warned me about an unknown publisher when installing

That's the standard warning for software still being signed. It's safe to proceed if you obtained the installer from CTRL Colab.

A folder shows as “unscannable”

Some protected or permission-restricted locations can't be fully read; their size may be approximate.

I deleted something by mistake

If you recycled it, restore it from the Windows Recycle Bin. Permanent deletes can't be undone.

14. Reporting a bug

If something isn't working right, Space Cowboy can hand you a ready-to-send bug report with the technical details already filled in, so our team can fix it faster. You stay in control the whole way: nothing is ever sent unless you send it yourself.

Where to find it

Look for the small bug button (🐞) in the bottom-right corner of the window, just to the left of the Help button. Hovering it shows the tooltip: “Report a bug (Alt-click to reveal the diagnostic file).”

Send a report (single click)

Click the bug button and Space Cowboy will:

1. Save a diagnostic report to a text file on your PC (see Where reports are saved).
2. Open a new message in your default email app, already addressed and filled in:

Add a short description of what went wrong under the prompt, then press Send.

Alt-click: open the report file directly

Hold Alt and click the bug button to open File Explorer with the saved .txt report highlighted. Handy if you'd rather read it yourself, keep a copy, or send it another way (a web form, or a reply to a support email).

If you don't use a default email app

No default email program set up? A single click simply falls back to the Alt-click behavior — it reveals the saved .txt so you can still get the report to support.

What's in the report

The report is plain text — a short header followed by a timestamped list of recent events. For example:

Space Cowboy — diagnostic report
version: 1.0.0
platform: windows x86_64
(no file names or paths are included)
----
[14:22:31] [app] started — v1.0.0
[14:22:33] [scan] started — C:, NTFS
[14:22:37] [broker] elevated helper launched
[14:22:37] [broker] helper connected
[14:22:38] [broker] MFT built — 1,243,902 records
[14:24:02] [delete] 3 requested, 3 removed, 412 MB freed → Recycle Bin
[14:25:10] [panic] index out of bounds @ tree.rs:102

What happened (please describe):

Each line is a timestamped event in one of these categories: app, scan, broker, delete, error, panic.

Where reports are saved

All reports are saved in your local app-data folder:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Space Cowboy\logs\

The email body includes a trimmed version (about the last 20 events) to stay within email length limits; the saved .txt file has the complete history.

Quick reference

15. Support

Need more help? Visit ctrlcolab.com/spacecowboy or reach out to CTRL Colab.