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I have a file server that has a pretty large folder tree. There's a shared folder, under that are 5 departmental folders. Nested inside of those are thousands of subfolders and files.

I would like to be able to trace growth of those 5 departmental folders. There are certain particular sub-sub-sub folders I'd also like to keep an eye on. This is so that, if I suddenly see my disk utilization % skyrocket, I can have a clue as to what folder this growth happened in, so I can drill down and discover whodunnit.

I thought about writing some sort of vb or powershell script (which would require learning the lang) to do a DU of each folder and then write out a table to a file or something. But I'm thinking this is reinventing the wheel because somebody has to have solved this before. Is anyone aware of a (hopefully freeware/OSS) solution to graphing various folders in a filesystem?

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6 Answers 6

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WatchDISK does exactly that -- shows directory sizes over time. WatchDISK's big brother, PA Storage Monitor does that plus more (besides tracking just directory sizes, it can tell you who the largest storage users are, where the MP3s are, etc).

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  • I'll call this the accepted answer, because this software does exactly what I asked. Costs a bit, but gets it done.
    – Aszurom
    Mar 2, 2010 at 14:22
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FolderSizes would do the job as well.

http://www.foldersizes.com/

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take a look at Corner Bowl disk monitor : http://www.diskmonitor.com/ not free but completely configurable to your needs, reasonable price you can try 20 days for free.

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I would use something like TreeSize:

http://dev.carl-thomas.net/Utils/TreeSize/index.htm

Or, if you just want to check folder sizes interactively, TreeSize Pro (which has no connected to the other one, despite the name):

http://www.jam-software.com/treesize/

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    Link to download that is a 404. Must not be avail or correctly linked on his site. Looks like a good CLI means of dumping that info to a txt file to parse later with a script though.
    – Aszurom
    Jan 24, 2010 at 20:39
  • Change the path on the exe download to match the source download, i.e., use: dev.carl-thomas.net/Utils/TreeSize/TreeSize.zip
    – Ward - Trying Codidact ♦
    Jan 25, 2010 at 18:19
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I would install quota. See: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Configuring-Disk-Quotas-Windows-2003.html

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    Disk quotas aren't really a method for tracking the growth of folders. Disk quotas are a method of controlling the usage of volumes (W2K3) or volumes and\or folders (W2K3R2, W2K8).
    – joeqwerty
    Jan 22, 2010 at 19:39
  • Is quota good for more than just doing a conditional threshold notification setup? Like, does it track space used over time or just notification when the space used reaches a set point?
    – Aszurom
    Jan 24, 2010 at 20:40
  • The purpose of quota is to limit the space used by an user or by the content of a folder. You can use the "soft" limit as a warning.
    – Mircea Vutcovici
    Jan 25, 2010 at 16:43
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I've seen recently a response on spiceworks website so I'll quote it.

tools like treesize cannot help me finding what folder growed since yesterday ? I am talking about a file server with thousands of folders and files (380GB data)

I use xinorbis (freeware) by now but it needs 6 hours to scan our file server with 386Gb of data while it runs as the only active app on a win 2008 virtual server . After that it can tell me what files changed since previous scan and a thousand more usefull things. It is good but a bit too slow. The database is also ver large (> 1GB) .

I'm going to use it. Don't want to pay any money :D Oh, and the link: Xinorbis

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