FolderSizes - Disk Space Manager

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Let’s talk about what we’ve been working on for our upcoming FolderSizes v4.6 release.

First and foremost, v4.6 contains a new integrated scheduling facility. With this tool, you can schedule the execution of any FolderSizes report type and export those results in a variety of formats. Here in our development labs, we’ve scheduled the generation of all of FolderSizes’ various report types, exporting each of them (in HTML format) to a shared folder on our network (effectively building an archive of data storage reports that speed and simplify storage hotspot identification, as well as providing historical context).

The next major focus of FolderSizes v4.6 is performance. Nearly every feature has received a comprehensive performance and resource usage evaluation, and this has process resulted in:

• The introduction of a new file owner data lookup cache
• Numerous improvements to our folder analysis data caching technology
• A nearly 60% memory usage reduction in many file report scan scenarios
• Numerous performance boosts when scanning remote (network) paths
• New options that provide more granular control over scan-time performance

Some of these improvements might sound a bit technical and geeky – but believe me, they amount to a serious performance and resource usage improvement in v4.6.

There are tons of other improvements as well – improved visual theme switching, “filename only” duplicate file matching, a greatly improved duplicate file report HTML export format, a new “allocated” column in several of the file reporting detail views, and much more. We also threw in a handful of bug fixes for good measure.

FolderSizes v4.6 is a free upgrade for existing v4 license holders. Get yours now – fresh off the compiler.

FolderSizes is featured in the Toolbox : New Products for IT Pros section of Microsoft TechNet magazine (May, 2008 edition).

It’s a really nice review, although I’m not quite sure how Greg (the reviewer) managed to capture such an ugly screen shot of the main window. To each their own, I suppose.

With MS Vista Service Pack 1 now available, some users have observed a non-trivial hit to their available disk space after installing the update.

What’s happening is that SP1 backs up previous versions of many components during installation, consuming quite a bit of disk space in the process. If you’re completely confident that you won’t need to uninstall SP1, you can actually reclaim that space. Vista SP1 includes an optional tool called Vsp1cln.exe which will remove the files backed up during installation. After the Vista SP1 installation completes, Vsp1cln.exe will be located in your Windows\system32 directory. You can run it by dropping to a command prompt (or press “Winkey + R” on your keyboard) and and typing Vsp1cln.exe and pressing Enter.

The cleanup utility will warn you that you’re about to make your Vista SP1 installation permanent, and prompt you for confirmation. Once confirmed, the cleanup process will begin. Again, don’t execute this file removal utility unless you’re certain that you won’t need to uninstall Vista SP1. But if you’ve created a full backup of your computer prior to installing Vista SP1 (I actually prefer to image my entire system before doing this sort of thing), this may not be much of a concern.

So how much disk space can you reclaim by running Vsp1cln.exe? Most users are reporting just under a gigabyte of recovered space, depending upon which version of Vista is installed. Your mileage may vary. And if you still need a better understanding of how your disk space is being consumed, well then you need FolderSizes.

For further guidance on installing Vista SP1, see Microsoft’s Windows Vista SP1 Deployment Guide.

Key Metric Software has released updates to both FolderSizes (v4.5.1.0) and Duplicate File Detective (v2.2.0.0). Here are the download links:

Download FolderSizes v4.5.1.0 (release notes)
Download Duplicate File Detective v2.2.0.0 (release notes)

The new Duplicate File Detective release is larger in scope, and contains a considerable number of feature enhancements. If you haven’t tried this powerful, dedicated duplicate file management tool – please do so soon.

Both releases are free upgrades to anyone who owns a license for the same major version number of the product.