We just released an update 5.0.5 for the paid version of ShowSize and ShowSize PE. It contains some minor fixes for a bug that affects the File Types report and Owners report when the filters are ON.
This version also contains some improvements in the Save/View Report feature available in the 5+ license editions of ShowSize. To get complete details and the download, the paid customers can login to the self-service web site support.showsize.com.
As a developer, the “Only Files” report is most useful to me. When using Visual Studio 2005, I often have my ASP.NET web site projects several levels deep. I keep a copy of the actual web site in another location from where I upload it by ftp to the server. This is so because the web.config in the local project and in production web site is different and uses different connections and flags.
When I have made modifications to my ASP.NET project and want to deploy them to production, I want to carefully see the list of files I have changed recently and then decide which ones I want to copy over. I could use an automatic folder syncing tool. But I’m wary of such tools that often do not give enough customization choices and one mistake can wipe out lot of work.
I use the “Only Files” report in ShowSize to quickly get a list of files I have changed in the project no matter where they are located within the project structure. Here is a picture:
As you can see above, this report lists “all” the files in my asp.net project in a single list. That means I get to see all the files even if they are in different folders deep inside. The advantage of a single list is that I can sort them by size or date. Here, the list is reverse sorted on “modified” date. I can see that I changed 6 files today, excluding the cterrors.txt that I know is not a file I changed by hand. Now I can right-click on a file and open its parent folder in explorer. Or, I can even right-click and do the explorer operation copy straight away.
The same concept will apply to any job whether it is web design or managing document collections. If your files are in several folders, the “only files” is going to give you a better picture of the changed or large size files than the regular single-folder file reports.
The discounts are now closed.
I’m scanning a huge disk with ShowSize and Windows is reporting a disk space shortage error. What folder does ShowSize use to keep its scanned results? Can that folder be redirected?
ShowSize uses the default “temporary” folder set up in Windows. You can redirect it by using any of the tips found on microsoft.com or other Windows web sites. Just type “redirect temporary folder in windows” on Google and you may find many tips on this.
I will try to explain the steps below.
First, you can verify that ShowSize is indeed using the temporary folder set up in Windows. To do this, first click on Start–Run in Windows to bring up the Run prompt. On Windows Vista, type Run in the Search Box that appears at the bottom on the Start menu. Type %temp% in the Open box and click OK. This will open the temporary folder. If ShowSize is running, you will see some file names starting with drm and drv there. These temporary files disappear as soon as you stop ShowSize.
You need to redirect this temporary folder by specifying another folder on a drive that has plenty of space. Once you do that, all your programs including ShowSize will start using the new location to store temporary files.
Here are the steps to redirect this temporary folder.
In the “User variables” frame, select the TMP variable and click on Edit button. Type new value as a folder on some other drive where there is plenty of space, for example, “E:\TEMP”. Don’t use the root of the drive as some programs can face problems. Always use a subfolder that you create specifically for this purpose.
Similarly, edit the value of the TEMP variable too to point to the new location above.
The same steps should work on Windows XP, Windows 2000, 2003 and Vista. But sometimes the redirection will work only after a reboot.
You can verify whether the temporary folder is redirected properly by following the same procedure that I explained at the top of this article to look for DRM and DRV files when running ShowSize.
System variables: What about the TMP and TEMP variables in the lower System Variables list? If you change them, they are set up for all the users of the computer but then they should be deleted from the user variables list of all the users. If you don’t understand this, it’s ok. It is an advanced concept.
I am looking for a Utility to report when files were last used on a Windows 2003 server. This is to allow me to determine what can be archived and the disk space required. Can ShowSize do that?
Yes, it can. Please scan one of your drives by using ShowSize. Then see the “Unused Files” report. The only problem is that some Windows versions can turn off the update of last access date of files. Windows Vista does that.
You can verify whether your Windows system does that by using ShowSize on a folder that you used recently. See what the report Unused Files shows in the “Used date” or “Not used days” columns for some known files. For a file reported to be used many days back, see its Explorer properties. This will update the last access date to today’s date (on properties) if the feature is not turned off on your Windows system. Then a refresh from ShowSize will also remove that file from the report.
Once you verify that Windows is recording the access date correctly, you can run ShowSize on other locations. But beware of locations shared with Vista computers. Those by default turn off this feature.
Note: In this case, Bob Thomson (who originally asked this question) did confirm that the feature to update the last access date was already ON on Windows 2003 and ShowSize worked perfectly on Windows 2003.
Is it posible to change the deliminator (field separator character) for the export to CSV operation?
ShowSize uses the List Separator set up in Windows Control Panel’s Regional Settings. To change that, please click on Control Panel–Change Display Language (Vista) or Regional Settings in XP. Go to the Formats page and click Customize. There you will see the box for List Separator character. Just replace “,” by some other character like ~ or #. You can even put a tab there but not directly. Start notepad, enter a tab and then copy and paste it.
Once you change the above, please stop and restart ShowSize. It will now use the new deliminator for all export CSV operations.
Can ShowSize list ALL files even in sub-folders that were created on a certain date, such as, all files created today or a date I can enter? I would love to be able to see all the files created or modified today because I have a disk that is filling up fast and not sure with thousands of sub-folders where the data is going.
Instead of putting all the possible features in filters and making them too complicated, we have made the reports more flexible, epsecially when you can do the sorting on any column.
For example, you can get the files created or modified on a certain date by using the “Only Files” report (not available in ShowSize PE). Once you get this report, click (once or twice) on the “Modified” column header, so that the files are sorted in the recently modified date order and the most recently modified file comes at the top. Then select the range of files in the dates you are interested in (click and shift-Click) and copy-paste to a document. Please have a look at the screen shots for “Only Files Report” to get an clear idea.
Another alternative is to export the report to a CSV file. You can do further analysis of the data by importing this CSV file to a database or a spreadsheet.
Incidentally, we have a an advanced option that allows you to use modified time as “later” of create and modified time, making the reports even more useful.
This article is posted again under http://showsize.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/06/last-used-files/
