FOLDER SIZE REPORTING

FolderSizes offers powerful capabilities for identifying long NTFS file system paths that might cause compatibility issues with other applications. This guide walks you through the simple process of locating files and folders with excessive path lengths.

Getting Started

1. Launch FolderSizes and click the Search button in the main ribbon bar to open the Search window.
2. Navigate to the Search Paths tab and enter the local or network locations you wish to analyze. You can add multiple paths as needed.
3. Click the Samples button in the Search window toolbar and select the pre-configured template called “Find Long File and Folder Paths.xml” from the list of built-in search samples.

Reviewing and Configuring Search Rules

After loading the sample, you’ll be taken to the Search Rules tab where you’ll see two predefined rules—one for files and one for folders. To examine or modify these rules:

1. Double-click on the file rule to open the File Rule Editor.
2. Select the Name Len tab to view the path length criteria.
3. Verify that the rule is set to match paths with more than 255 characters.
4. Ensure the Count the full path length option is selected (this is crucial as it considers the entire path, not just the filename).
5. Close the File Rule Editor when you’re satisfied with the configuration.

Running the Search

Click the Start button in the Search window to begin the search operation. When completed, the results will display all files and folders with paths exceeding 255 characters.

The search results provide comprehensive information about each item, including:

• Full path
• File/folder size
• Allocated size (“size on disk”)
• Additional attributes (customizable by right-clicking the column header)

Why This Matters

This functionality is particularly valuable because many applications and systems struggle to process paths beyond certain length thresholds. Identifying these long paths helps you proactively manage potential compatibility issues before they cause problems.

With FolderSizes, locating problematic long paths becomes a straightforward task that can save you significant troubleshooting time down the road.

Just a quick note to let you know that FolderSizes 8.2 is now available.

This minor version release introduces a handful of new features. Most notably, FolderSizes 8.2 now includes summary footers for all file reports – including full support for most export file types (the ones that make sense), printing, etc. This is a feature that users have been requesting for a while now, so we’re happy to get it into your hands.

FolderSizes 8.2 also includes another popular feature request – the ability to move or copy files (via the File Operations dialog) while retaining the existing folder structure.

We’ve also improved support for Windows Server Data Deduplication in the duplicate files report, updated default file report column layouts, improved the zip compression progress dialog, updated the task scheduler listing to support sorting, updated the help file, and fixed a number of bugs.

Feel free to download FolderSizes 8.2 whenever you’re ready – it’s a free update for all existing FolderSizes 8 license holders. And if you’re still running an older major version of FolderSizes, we recommend upgrading today – you’re missing all the good new stuff!

Windows Server and some third-party hierarchical storage management (HSM) systems provide offline file management capabilities, allowing policies to be established which cause old or infrequently used files to be moved to cheaper and slower storage systems. In such cases, the original file is replaced with a small “stub” file that resolves to the new location.

So how does FolderSizes report on such files? Typically an offline stub file will occupy a single cluster on the file system – and that’s exactly what FolderSizes (correctly) reports in the vast majority of cases.

However, we have seen rare instances where the size of offline stub files was reported incorrectly. In order to understand this scenario, it’s important to know that (by default) FolderSizes assigns itself  backup and restore privileges whenever possible. It does this in order to decrease the likelihood of permissions issues, thereby improving visibility into the target file system.

However, occasionally we’ve run across HSM appliances that report the size of stub files in terms of their original values (before the file was moved offline) when queried by an application with backup/restore privileges assigned, assumedly because this would be the size occupied by a backup. This can be a problem for FolderSizes, since we want to know actual disk space usage for files on the storage device (not their offline file sizes).

FolderSizes offers a couple potential workarounds for this problem. First, in Options | Scanning, users can elect to disable the assignment of backup/restore privileges to FolderSizes, which will usually fix the problem at its source. The same option screen also allows users to explicitly set the allocated size of offline files according to some predefined value (a single cluster, 4Kb, 8Kb, or 16Kb), which can be used to work around the problem.

Finally, it might be worth noting that FolderSizes will never trigger the retrieval of offline files during the course of any analysis or reporting process (generally a process must read from or write to an offline file in order to trigger a recall).

Today we published a new article on using FolderSizes to analyze Windows Server file system that have data deduplication services enabled. Please find a link to the article below:

Windows Data Deduplication : Disk Space Reporting & Visualization Implications

Just a quick note to let our users know that FolderSizes v8.1 has been released.

FolderSizes v8.1 contains over a dozen feature improvements and a handful of bug fixes. Please see the full release notes here:

https://www.foldersizes.com/content/static/releasenotes.htm