If you get a moment, take a minute to look at the FolderSizes product release notes. I mean, really look at them.

Even though the current version of FolderSizes is 5.6 (at the time of the writing), history reveals over 80 distinct public releases of FolderSizes since its initial release in 2003.

This relentless dedication to incremental improvement is one of the main reasons FolderSizes is the leader in disk space analysis, reporting, and visualization today. We never stop listening to our customers. We never ignore an opportunity to improve FolderSizes. And we always strive to give our customers a ton of value for their money.

Key Metric Software is small and agile. When you communicate with us, you’re talking directly to the people that engineer FolderSizes (and our other award-winning products). We don’t have a bunch of sales people or support technicians that serve to buffer us from our customers. And we never will.

So go ahead – send us an email with your ideas, comments, or recommendations. We’re listening!

Organizations of all shapes and sizes are using FolderSizes to solve real-world storage analysis and management problems.

Here’s just a few of our customers:

• Hewlett-Packard
• Disney
• Nestle USA
• Exxon Mobil
• Chevron
• Polo Ralph Lauren
• Midway USA
• Caterpillar Inc.
• University of Illinois
• U.S. Navy
• Software Spectrum
• University of Michigan
• US Dept. of Agriculture
• National Basketball Association (NBA)
• Molson Coors Brewing Company
• Lockheed Martin
• ConocoPhillips
• Toyota
• Blue Cross / Blue Shield
• ATK Aerospace Systems Group
• Auburn University
• Abbott Laboratories
• US Attorneys Office
• Rolls-Royce
• The Heritage Group
• Supreme Court of the U.S.
• U.S. Army
• Qualcomm
• Codemasters
• Goodrich Corporation
• U.S. Department of Justice
• Epic Games
• Autodesk
• Dell
• Marathon Oil
• US Department of the Interior
• The University of Pennsylvania
• Yale University
• Truman Medical Center
• Sears
• Verizon Wireless
• L’OREAL
• University of Colorado
• VMWare
• Raytheon Missile Systems
• Bureau of Land Management
• Siemens

And over twenty-five thousand more. Why not download the free FolderSizes 15-day trial and see what it can do for you?

FolderSizes v5.6 was released today, and it offers a number of great feature enhancements (as well as a few bug fixes). In this post, I’d like to draw your attention to two specific improvements.

First, the file report generator now runs against an entirely new threading model that can improve the performance of multi-path scenarios quite dramatically. In our lab tests, file reports generated against multiple local and remote drives completed in nearly half the time (vs. FolderSizes v5.5 and previous releases). Even more dramatic gains can be had when analyzing only multiple, discrete network file systems of similar proportions.

At the same time, we’ve achieved a nearly 40% reduction in overall file report memory usage. Again, these gains come largely from our highly specialized and proprietary memory storage models – ensuring that FolderSizes continues to be the most scalable and performant disk space analysis product available.

The second thing I wanted to touch on is more directly aimed at home users. FolderSizes 5.6 removes the network path restrictions associated with personal edition licenses. In other words, personal edition license holders can now analyze network paths just like Pro edition users can. Other feature restrictions still apply (see order page for details).

You can download the latest version of FolderSizes now and/or review the full release notes on our product website.

Key Metric Software is proud to announce the release of FolderSizes v5.5 – a free upgrade for all existing v5 license holders.

FolderSizes v5.5 contains many new features and improvements,  including:

- Many improvements to hierarchical Folder Map graph
- Huge increases in Search tool performance
- More flexible attribute matching in filtering, search
- New path history navigation pop-up menus
- New Relative Age main window detail view column
- Numerous improvements to our “super tooltips”
- New Graph ribbon bar tab with several new functions
- Improved file owner reporting and search
- Lots more!

Download it (and/or view full release notes) here:

http://www.foldersizes.com/download-folder-sizes/

Key Metric Software is proud to announce the release of FolderSizes 5.1 now with support for disk space analysis report delivery via email.

Specifically, any disk space analysis report generated by the FolderSizes command line or scheduler interfaces can now also be delivered to one or more email addresses. FolderSizes does this by communicating directly with your mail service provider (via SMTP). Here’s what the email configuration screen in FolderSizes looks like:

As you can see, FolderSizes email integration supports SMTP authentication, protocol-level security (SSL and TLS), SMTP connection logging, and much more.

Support for report delivery via has also been integrated directly into the FolderSizes report scheduler.

In the screen shot above, we’re analyzing the path “c:\temp” and exporting the resulting disk space analysis report in two formats – one HTML and one CSV. When we enable the “Email report file(s)” option, FolderSizes will deliver both export files to the specified email addresses. FolderSizes can schedule and delivery file reports and search operations in a similar manner.

FolderSizes 5.1 is a free upgrade for any existing v5 license holder, and is available for immediate download.

Yesterday, we published a bug-fix release of FolderSizes (version 5.0.84). It resolves a number of problems, and is a recommended upgrade for all users (download from here).

We also released a new build of Duplicate File Detective 4. If you haven’t yet had a chance to check out Duplicate File Detective 4, you’re missing out on an amazing release of a software product that complements FolderSizes very nicely (we even offer Duplicate File Detective at a promotional price to FolderSizes users – email us for details)!

Duplicate File Detective 4 is a major new release, and offers a wealth of new features, including support for finding duplicate songs (MP3, iTunes, and many others), file hash caching, zip file content analysis, a new media preview window, and tons more. Please download the free trial today and see for yourself.

Key Metric Software now has a channel on YouTube.

Our first two video demos are for our flagship disk space analysis software – FolderSizes!

~ Managing disk space with FolderSizes
~ What’s New in FolderSizes 5

Please stay tuned for more video demos and tutorials to come.

FolderSizes 5 introduces a tremendously useful new feature called calculated date/time fields. In this article, I’ll show you how they work and why they’re so beneficial.

Like every other feature in FolderSizes, calculated date/time fields solve a very real problem. In this case, the issue is that Windows maintains last modified, created, and last accessed date/time stamps for folders using a set of rules that ultimately reflect the operating system’s lack of inherent knowledge of what folders contain.

As an example, let’s look at the modified date/time of a specific folder and compare it against what’s presented in the FolderSizes calculated modified date. To do this, start FolderSizes 5 and configure the main window report view so that the Modified (calculated) column is shown. As seen in the screen shot below (click image for a closer look), you can right-click the detail view column header to configure which columns are shown:

Now for our example we’ll analyze the C:\Windows folder with FolderSizes 5. Below, you’ll see a snippet of the report created by FolderSizes, with the Logs sub-folder highlighted (click the image for a closer look):

Here you can see that FolderSizes presents two modified date/time stamps for each folder – the original modified date/time (as reported by the Windows operating system) and the calculated modified date/time. For this example, I’ve positioned the two columns next to one another (which you can do by dragging and dropping the column headers) so you can easily see that the calculated modified date differs (considerably) from the normal one.

So how are these two values computed and why are they different?

The answer lies in the fact that normal folder date/time stamps must be explicitly maintained by the Windows operating system. If you were to move a file into the Logs folder shown above, for example, then Windows would alter the folder’s modified date/time accordingly. However, if you were to use a text editor to modify a text file within the Logs folder, Windows would know nothing about this operation, and the modified date/time stamp on the Logs folder would remain unchanged.

Contrast this behavior with what is shown in the Modified (calculated) date/time field within FolderSizes 5. Here, FolderSizes 5 exploits the fact that it knows the contents of every folder and shows a calculated modified date/time representing the most recently modified object in the given file system branch (folder).

This is an extremely powerful capability, allowing you to view and sort folders by deduced (i.e. calculated) date/time stamps that actually reflect their contents.

When Key Metric Software launched its Duplicate File Detective product in May of 2005, we had a simple goal in mind – produce a superior product for IT professionals and experienced computing users. Since then, Duplicate File Detective has experienced strong growth – helping thousands of customers manage and optimize their file systems by providing superior, scalable, and reliable file deduplication.

Our customers have also found that FolderSizes and Duplicate File Detective work very well together. Although FolderSizes does have a duplicate file report that can identify duplicates by a combination of file name, date, and size – Duplicate File Detective goes far beyond this capability with content comparison services, advanced duplicate file selection/marking features, extremely robust duplicate file processing (moving, deleting, and archiving) facilities, and much more.

When we first released Duplicate File Detective, we decided to make it available at a huge discount to anyone purchasing FolderSizes. Simply click any of the FolderSizes license purchase links on the order page, and you’ll be given the opportunity to purchase Duplicate File Detective at half its normal price point. You end up paying $20.00 US dollars for the most powerful duplicate file management software available!

We originally intended to run this promotion for a limited time only, but we’ve since decided to extend it indefinitely. After all, it just makes good sense and our customers love it.

Just another great reason to buy FolderSizes today.

P.S. If you missed the boat and purchased a FolderSizes license without taking advantage of this offer, you’re probably now living a life of profound regret, shame and sadness. Well, don’t worry – just email us, and we’ll make it right!

From a feature perspective, FolderSizes 5 is easily the most compelling version of our flagship disk space analysis and reporting software ever released. New features such as concurrent analysis of multiple file system paths, support for saving and re-loading XML file system analysis data, calculated date/time fields, and rules-based search are garnering rave reviews from our customers.

But the feature of which we’re most proud is perhaps a bit less flashy, and yet still critically important in the age of multi-terabyte storage subsystems. It’s a feature that required changes to every single aspect of FolderSizes – from the disk space visualization and reporting mechanisms down to the proprietary in-memory file system database that drives them.

That feature is native 64-bit support.

Earlier releases of FolderSizes would indeed run on 64-bit systems, and it did so through the magic of WoW64, a compatibility layer that allows 32-bit applications to operate in 64-bit environments. Which sort of begs the question – if FolderSizes has always worked in 64-bit environments, why does the new native 64-bit support matter at all?

There’s a one-word answer for that question: scalability. FolderSizes is designed from the ground up to store file system analysis data directly in system memory. This approach has a number of important benefits, the most important of which is performance – using system memory instead of a back-end database provides FolderSizes with serious performance advantages, allowing our customers to solve real-world storage analysis problems faster and with greater efficiency.

So how does the FolderSizes in-memory database design relate to scalability? The answer lies in a fundamental limit of all 32-bit processes – they can only address (access) around 2-3GB of system memory, regardless of how much memory is actually present in the host computer.

From a software perspective, this addressable memory cap represents an arbitrary limit to scalability. For enterprises with large, multi-terabyte storage systems, our customers need FolderSizes to scale without such limits. If the host computer running FolderSizes has 8 or 16 GB of system memory, then that memory should be usable by running applications (including FolderSizes) to solve real-world business problems. 64-bit systems have experienced massive gains in market share recently, precisely because memory is cheap and scalability is more critical than ever.

The 64-bit edition of FolderSizes 5 blows away the scalability limits of the 32-bit world. Current 64-bit system architectures allows access to 256 TB (yes, that’s terabytes) of memory address space, further positioning FolderSizes as the leader in enterprise-class storage analysis software.

If you’re ready to solve real-world storage analysis problems with amazing performance and without arbitrary limits, then FolderSizes 5 is waiting for you.