FolderSizes v4.8 is Released

Today, Key Metric Software of Traverse City, MI releases version 4.8 of FolderSizes, the world leader in disk space analysis and visualization software.

New features include:

• Support for Windows 7
• Improved support for 64-bit Windows operating systems with a new 64-bit version of the FolderSizes shell context menu
  
• Broader, more scalable, and more resource efficient support for exporting reports as XML
• New support for visualizing allocated disk space (e.g. "size on disk"), which accounts for cluster overhang, compression, etc.
• New ability to search and filter by allocated file system object size
  
• Numerous performance enhancements, especially in file report detail view sorting
• A new column in search results that shows file system object name length
• New ability to exclude folders from search results
• Improved drill-down from within range-based and categorical file reports
• Many other improvements and minor bug fixes
  
  

This release is a free upgrade for any existing FolderSizes v4.x license holder.

The full v4.8.0.55 release notes can be viewed here. Or proceed directly to download.

Over 10,000 FolderSizes Licenses Sold

Key Metric Software has now sold more than ten thousand unique FolderSizes product licenses.

And the actual user count is much higher. Why? Because we have numerous large enterprise customers, such as ExxonMobil and Chevron (just two examples), who have worldwide license contracts with many, many individual users. What's more, a large percentage of our license sales are for multi-user "license packs" and site-wide licenses (even though we only count these as one license sale).

Why has FolderSizes become so pervasive? Because regardless of how many cheap clones and open-source freebies (with a fraction of the features) appear on the market, FolderSizes is the obvious "professional grade" choice for businesses. Not only does FolderSizes support advanced functionality not available in other solutions, it's also backed by a software company that's deeply committed to customer satisfaction. As other disk space visualization and management tools have come and gone, FolderSizes continues to be developed and vigorously supported.

When you (or your company) licenses FolderSizes, you're ensuring the continuity of the best disk space analysis and management software tool on the market today.

And you know what - we're not slowing down. More about the next major release of FolderSizes in a future blog.

Empty Folders - Revisited

A lot of people use FolderSizes for its integrated search facility, which we've engineered from the group up to be super-flexible. You can get answers to a vast number of data storage questions using FolderSizes search, and one of the most popular questions is - where are my empty folders?

Of course, with FolderSizes you can find empty folders not only on your local computer file system, but on any file system accessible to FolderSizes (including other machines accessible via your local area network, etc.).

I've talked before about how to use FolderSizes to find empty folders - we've even made a video about it. But in this blog entry, I'm also going to provide a sample FolderSizes search definition file for getting this job done. Here it is:

Empty_Folders_Search_Job.xml

Using this search job with FolderSizes is very simple:

1. Download the search job XML file above and save it on your computer somewhere (you can right-click it and choose "save as" from the resulting menu).
   
2. Start FolderSizes v4.7 and click the Search toolbar button.
3. In the search window, click the Load toolbar button and navigate to the search job file saved in step 1.
4. Tweak the search paths to suit your needs. This sample search definition file scans the "C:\" drive, but any file system (local or remote) is fair game.
5. Click the Start toolbar button.
   
   

That's it - you're off and running. When the search process completes, you'll have a list of empty folders, which you can then sort, export for later analysis, print, etc.

FolderSizes = Safe and Secure Software

Here at KeyMetric Software, we have a deep and ongoing commitment to releasing safe and secure software products to our customers. For example, our flagship software product - FolderSizes - is in use by many thousands of organizations and individuals across the globe, and we take seriously our responsibility to ensure the security of those product installations.

Toward this end, here are the most recent results of our comprehensive anti-virus scanning process (performed against the latest publicly available build of FolderSizes):

Note: a virus scan result of "-" means that the anti-virus product detected no threats.

Antivirus	Version	Last Update	Result
AhnLab-V3	2008.12.19.0	2008.12.18	-
AntiVir	7.9.0.45	2008.12.18	-
Authentium	5.1.0.4	2008.12.18	-
Avast	4.8.1281.0	2008.12.18	-
AVG	8.0.0.199	2008.12.18	-
BitDefender	7.2	2008.12.18	-
CAT-QuickHeal	10.00	2008.12.18	-
ClamAV	0.94.1	2008.12.18	-
Comodo	771	2008.12.17	-
DrWeb	4.44.0.09170	2008.12.18	-
eSafe	7.0.17.0	2008.12.17	-
eTrust-Vet	31.6.6267	2008.12.18	-
Ewido	4.0	2008.12.18	-
F-Prot	4.4.4.56	2008.12.17	-
F-Secure	8.0.14332.0	2008.12.18	-
Fortinet	3.117.0.0	2008.12.18	-
GData	19	2008.12.18	-
Ikarus	T3.1.1.45.0	2008.12.18	-
K7AntiVirus	7.10.557	2008.12.18	-
Kaspersky	7.0.0.125	2008.12.18	-
McAfee	5467	2008.12.18	-
McAfee+Artemis	5467	2008.12.18	-
Microsoft	1.4205	2008.12.18	-
NOD32	3703	2008.12.18	-
Norman	5.80.02	2008.12.17	-
Panda	9.0.0.4	2008.12.18	-
PCTools	4.4.2.0	2008.12.18	-
Prevx1	V2	2008.12.18	-
Rising	21.08.32.00	2008.12.18	-
SecureWeb-Gateway	6.7.6	2008.12.18	-
Sophos	4.37.0	2008.12.18	-
Sunbelt	3.2.1801.2	2008.12.11	-
Symantec	10	2008.12.18	-
TheHacker	6.3.1.4.191	2008.12.17	-
TrendMicro	8.700.0.1004	2008.12.18	-
VBA32	3.12.8.10	2008.12.18	-
ViRobot	2008.12.18.1525	2008.12.18	-
VirusBuster	4.5.11.0	2008.12.18	-
Additional information
File size: 6125496 bytes
MD5...: 08111d4d3929acd8d80e74b29f32c5de
SHA1..: 2ed7d2e8f0f6b2e970eabc96141f78672c93e623
SHA256: b5aae59e5b53eb0ee504db60a60951c4c00ce1c8e852fc5e928507e2bfa94e06
SHA512: 15d1f978c4a7ed50e842752b138d1e7e949ff39fd42cbd5c3b7b53de6b39e999 bc8549006e1f2a50cbe57a35880ffa648968fa0928a786b5d3f112577a52d52d
ssdeep: 98304:PgXgeaQyIbt1tNuKyYGz7/W+kpyS3mM2/v3Vdn9rMB++HaSXWB1cEE6Duk Wu:PgXge/nPN+/8yG2Hk3mB1cEE6DJ

Disk Usage in Windows 7

An interesting discussion of Windows disk space usage in the upcoming Windows 7 release:

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/11/19/disk-space.aspx

FolderSizes v4.7 is Released

FolderSizes v4.7 is now available for download.

As I discussed in a recent blog entry, this new release provides a fascinating new way to view hierarchical folder structures - the folder map. We're extremely excited about this capability, as we believe this is a best-in-class implementation of a very modern data visualization technique known as treemapping.

Version 4.7 of FolderSizes also introduces a new license type - the personal edition license - designed specifically for home users (and priced accordingly at only $25.00 USD). There are a few functional limitations (described in detail here) in the personal edition of FolderSizes, and it cannot be used in any business or organizational environment. But for folks needing a disk space analysis tool for home / personal use, this new license type should be very welcome. In fact, users have been asking us for this for quite some time.

Additional information about v4.7 can found in the online release notes.

FolderSizes v4.7 BETA

The next release of FolderSizes (version 4.7) will contain a new feature that I'm really excited about. We're calling this new feature a Folder Map view, and it provides a graphical representation of a complete subfolder hierarchy within a limited amount of space.

Let's jump right to a screenshot (click it for a slightly clearer view):



This is a Folder Map visualization of my C:\Windows system directory. The entire subfolder hierarchy is shown as a series of nested rectangles, computed with a technique known as Treemapping. The larger the rectangle, the more storage space the corresponding folder is consuming.

This new visualization approach is interesting because it provides much greater depth than other graph types (such as bar and pie graphs) can reasonably achieve. It's almost impossible, for example, to show a hierarchy of 5,000 folders within a pie graph - the individual pie slices would be too small and cluttered to be useful. Bar graphs have a similar limitation in that thousands of entries would require lots of scrolling to view all the data they represent.

For the next couple of weeks, I'll be looking for BETA testers to try out this new feature. If you're interested, please contact me via email as soon as possible.