FOLDER SIZE REPORTING

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:

https://www.foldersizes.com/download

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.

FolderSizes provides 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 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. 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. Here, FolderSizes 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.