FOLDER SIZE REPORTING

Now that FolderSizes 8 is available to the public, we’d just like to remind everyone about our deep commitment to producing safe software products that you can trust.

FolderSizes 8 is 100% free of viruses, malware, and adware. Please see FolderSizes’ current status on VirusTotal for details.

We also proudly present a Norton Secured seal on our product homepage, and you can view that seal here:

This seal offers independent verification (by Symantec) of website ownership and states that we’re 100% free of malware. It also links to our Norton Rating, which indicates that our website has zero computer or identity threats of any kind.

So please use FolderSizes with confidence, knowing that we’re working hard to produce a safe, trusted, and guaranteed software product.

Today I’m happy to announce the public availability of FolderSizes 8 – the new major version of our market-leading disk space analysis and reporting tool for Windows.

It took over a year of active development and hundreds of testing hours to reach this point, and we couldn’t be happier with the result. Nearly every aspect of FolderSizes has been touched by this release, starting with deep improvements to our core file system analysis engine and carrying all the way through to the user interface.

Learn more about what’s new in FolderSizes 8 here, or just go right for the download and try it for yourself.

With the release of FolderSizes 8, we’ve also revealed our new product website. Clean, professional, and mobile device friendly, the new website is designed to help our existing users find what they need quickly while simultaneously showing new users what makes FolderSizes so special.

As always, your feedback regarding FolderSizes 8 is very much appreciated, so don’t hesitate to contact us with your thoughts, questions, or comments.

System administrators are constantly being asked to verify user permissions for specific files and folders. This is often a time-consuming task, with multiple layers of NTFS permissions and repeated adjustments over time creating a security labyrinth.

To help address this problem, Key Metric Software has released the first version of Permissions Reporter, a free software tool that allows you to quickly validate the current security posture of entire file systems at once. All with multiple export formats, command-line support, built-in scheduling, and much more.

Download Permissions Reporter today for free and let us know what you think.

Many folks are familiar with the concept of zipping files or folders in order to reduce their size. However, Windows has the built-in ability to compress folders and files in a manner that is virtually invisible to users, offering significant space savings without changing how you work.

Why NTFS Compression?

The biggest advantage of using NTFS compression is its complete transparency to users. There’s no need to compress and decompress manually like with stand-alone utilities such as WinZip. Once applied, NTFS compression and decompression occurs automatically in the background, without any user intervention.

NTFS compression is also remarkably flexible in how you can apply it:

• Individual files – Compress just specific large documents
• Folders – Apply to entire directories of compatible files
• Entire drives – Maximize space savings across a complete volume

When to Use NTFS Compression

Some file types compress much better than others. For maximum space savings, focus on these highly compressible file types:

Performance Considerations

NTFS compression does involve some performance tradeoffs. Windows automatically decompresses files when you open them and recompresses them when closed. This process consumes CPU resources, which can impact performance when working with frequently accessed files.

For optimal results, apply NTFS compression to:

• Folders containing infrequently accessed documents
• Archive folders with reference materials
• Old project files you need to keep but rarely open

Avoid compressing:

• System files and program folders
• Files you access multiple times daily
• Files that already have poor compression ratios

How to Apply NTFS Compression

Compressing an Entire Drive

Compressing Individual Files or Folders

Maximizing Your Results with FolderSizes

A key component of using any compression mechanism effectively is understanding how your disk space is currently being allocated. FolderSizes helps you:

• Identify exactly which files and folders are consuming the most space
• Find the best compression candidates based on file type and size
• Discover duplicate files that could be deleted instead of compressed
• Analyze compression ratios to see how much space you’ve saved
• Monitor disk space usage over time to prevent future storage issues

FolderSizes 7 introduced an powerful feature called Snapshots, which allow you to capture the metadata state of an entire file system for further analysis at a later date and time. Snapshots are useful for a wide variety of purposes, but today we’ll focus on the ability to search a file system even after it’s no longer online.

We’ll start by first using the Snapshot feature within FolderSizes 7 to capture the state of a file system point. Please note that Snapshots can be generated from any available file system node – a drive, folder, network share, or even multiples of any of the above. For this example, we’ll capture the entirety of the host system’s D drive.

Start by selecting Snapshot | Create New Snapshot from the main window within FolderSizes.

The Snapshot Generator window will appear. As mentioned above, we’re capturing the state of the local data drive (with a drive letter of “D”) in this example, and writing the resulting Snapshot (.fssx) file to a temporary folder on the local C drive.

Clicking the Create Snapshot button will begin the capture process. The amount of time required and the size of the resulting Snapshot (.fssx) file will depend upon the amount of data stored on the D drive (in addition to other variables such as disk speed, etc.). In the case of our example, the FolderSizes Snapshot feature captured the state of 11,238 folders and 1,516,277 files within an elapsed time of 3 minutes and 26 seconds.

I would like to point out that FolderSizes has built-in support for scheduling the generation of Snapshots. This not only allows the capture to take place during non-business hours (if desired), but also easily enables the accumulation of regular Snapshot (.fssx) files for later use (e.g. trend analysis, data archival, etc.).

Now that we have a Snapshot (.fssx) data file, it can be used in place of the equivalent live file system within FolderSizes. You can generate folder reports, file reports, and searches against the Snapshot data file, but in this case we’re going to try a search.

We start the FolderSizes Search tool and use the New Path button to browse for our newly created Snapshot file.

As you can see above, we’ve designated the Snapshot file as a search path. In fact, you can easily search multiple Snapshot files using this method just by adding them to the list. You can even search a combination of Snapshot files and live search paths at once.

Now we’ll switch to the Search Rules tab and define a simple file-based search rule that will find any image files within our Snapshot.

With that done, we can close the File Rule Editor and Start the search. Since the Search itself is reading from a single, consolidated Snapshot, it will generally execute very quickly. In the example scenario above, the search found 1,345,085 image files for a total of 10 GB of disk space within 1 mins and 55 seconds.

And so there you have a simple, step-by-step example of how to capture the state of a file system node as an offline Snapshot (.fssx) file, and later search it at will even when the target file system node is no longer available.

Benefits of this technique include:

• Provide reporting and analysis capabilities to other users that lack access to the target file
  system(s)
• Create a history of file system state that can be used for historical review or investigation
• Generate reports even when the target file system(s) are offline or otherwise unavilable

In future articles, we’ll discuss additional capabilities exposed by this amazingly powerful and unique capability of FolderSizes.