What's New in FolderSizes 5

The following video demo provides a brief overview of just some of the amazing new features in FolderSizes 5 - download it today and experience it for yourself!


Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to this technical overview of FolderSizes.

FolderSizes is award-winning, network-enabled disk space analysis software for Windows. It can quickly isolate large, old, temporary, and duplicate files, or even show file distribution by type, attributes, or owner. All with multiple export formats, command-line support, integrated search, built-in scheduling, and much more.

Today, we'll look at some of the exciting new features in FolderSizes version 5.

When you first start FolderSizes 5, you're presented with a graphical view of storage devices known to your computer. This view shows fixed, removable, network, and other drive types - as well as the amount of disk space in use by each.

Now, let's get down to specifics by clicking the Analyze All Drives hyperlink. Because we've elected to analyze multiple discrete storage devices at the same time, FolderSizes automatically displays the Scan Data window. We start seeing results *immediately*.

New in version 5, the scan data window provides direct access to FolderSizes' high-performance, in-memory file system analysis database. Here you can see precisely how the FolderSizes thread pool intelligently distributes the analysis workload across multiple physical storage devices - for maximum performance. Not only that, but you can interact with this data *without* interrupting the analysis process, or view all top-level file system nodes from a common root.

Also new in FolderSizes 5 is the ability to re-load existing file system analysis data from XML. Here, we're re-loading a previously saved snapshot of our Windows system folder. The scan data window clearly indicates that file system data was imported from an external source.

Alright, so let's re-analyze our Windows system folder so we've got a fresh, current view of it. This time, we're going to use the new Compare feature to open our existing XML scan data. The result is a differential view formed by the comparison of past and present snapshots of this folder. Immediately, we see that the Logs subfolder has grown considerably. This might be a good starting point for further investigations.

We've also overhauled the Search tool in FolderSizes 5 to include a powerful rules-based engine. Let's start by indicating which file system paths we want to search. We'll include our local root drive and that of a machine on the network. For this example, we'll define a rule for finding all the empty folders within our target paths. Click the New Rule button and select New Folder Rule from the drop-down menu. Optionally give your rule a descriptive name. Next, we indicate that we wish to include only folders with a size equal to 0. Run the search to find empty folders, and process them however you see fit.

Now, let's say we want to file empty *files* in addition to empty folders. Click the New Rule button again, but this time we'll build a File Rule. And again we'll give the rule a name and specify our interest in zero-length files. Click OK and run the search again.

Now we see both empty folders and empty files in the same report, which can then be printed, exported in a variety of formats, and much more.

So there you have a brief overview of just some of the new features in FolderSizes 5. There's obviously much more to talk about and experience, and so the best thing for you to do is to download the new FolderSizes 5 release and try it for yourself.

Thanks for watching.