Backups are a critical part of disaster recovery, but backing up data you don't need wastes time, storage, and money. FolderSizes helps you understand exactly what's on your storage systems so you can make informed decisions about what to back up, what to archive, and what to remove.
Reduce Your Backup Footprint
The fastest way to speed up backups is to reduce the amount of data being backed up. FolderSizes provides several tools to identify data that doesn't need to be in your backup set:
- Find unused files — Identify files that haven't been accessed or modified in months or years. These can often be archived to cheaper storage and excluded from regular backups.
- Remove duplicates — Eliminate redundant copies of files that inflate your backup size without adding protection.
- Find temporary and non-business files — Use search and the Non-Business Files report to identify temp files, personal media, and other content that may not warrant backup resources.
Understand Actual Disk Space Consumption
Effective backup planning requires understanding both the logical size and the allocated size of your data. FolderSizes reports both metrics, accounting for:
- Cluster overhang — Small files can consume significantly more disk space than their logical size suggests
- NTFS compression — Compressed files use less actual disk space than their logical size
- Sparse files — Files that contain large empty regions may have very different logical vs. allocated sizes
Knowing the true allocated size helps you accurately estimate backup storage requirements and transfer times.
Monitor Storage Growth
Backup capacity planning requires understanding how your storage is growing. FolderSizes provides two levels of growth tracking:
- Disk-level history — Automatically tracks free and used space for local and network volumes over time. Use this to predict when drives will fill up and plan backup storage accordingly.
- Folder-level trend analysis — Capture file system snapshots over time and compare them to see precisely where growth is occurring — by folder, file type, owner, or age. This reveals which data sets are driving backup growth.
Schedule and Share Reports
Use the built-in task scheduler to generate storage reports on a recurring basis. Reports can be exported to HTML, Excel, PDF, CSV, or XML and emailed automatically to storage administrators, backup operators, or management.
This gives your team regular visibility into what's consuming storage and how it's changing — without anyone having to run reports manually.
Practical Backup Optimization Workflow
- Scan your backup targets with FolderSizes to understand current storage composition
- Review the File Ages report to identify stale data for archival
- Use the Largest Files report to find oversized files that dominate backup times
- Run the Duplicate Files report to eliminate redundancy
- Set up scheduled snapshots and trend analysis to monitor ongoing growth
- Revisit quarterly to keep your backup set lean and efficient