Empty Folders – Revisited

A lot of people use FolderSizes for its integrated search facility, which we’ve engineered from the ground 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.