Blog: ShowSize, Articles and tips

“I use ShowSize as a tool to assist in the development of Excel Workbook Reports for our IT staff. The tool has also become valuable in the migration (virtualization) of our servers into an IBM Data Center running VMware Infrastructure and analyzing data at the multi-terabyte level.

At my most routine use, ShowSize allows me to investigate where data is hiding when a user reports a space usage problem, or when a fellow IT member wants to know where (and to whom) disk space is allocated on a particular server.

For analysis, I use ShowSize in gathering the size information of all data on our file servers and then exporting those scans into Excel where I can further analyze the data. For instance, getting the size data on top-level shares allows me to create folder-size comparison sets at the departmental and section (or building) level and reporting that into average and total amounts per server and location.

I also use ShowSize in analyzing NTFS ownership information on the data itself. Getting this information from our servers allows the creation of in-depth reports showing our user’s space utilization. When aggregating this information across servers (and across users) it allows me to create summaries on the lowest, highest, and average points of space utilization per user in our organization at the server, department, or section level.

Using the data gathered from ShowSize, I create reports on a regular basis for storage comparison or for specific projects. Since ShowSize works at any point between the server and user level it has become a key resource in analyzing our data. This allows us to plan future storage needs thus assisting us with expense projections for additional disk and backup hardware.”

Note from ShowSize support: The ShowSize report that William often uses is the Owners report. This report is available in the minimum 5 user license edition of ShowSize. The 5-user edition also supports saving of reports for subsequent viewing on any systems, even those not connected to the original system or its disks. The report viewer is fully interactive, allowing you to apply the filters or sorts on the collected data and to see any of the 7 reports in a tabbed interface.

I am beginning this Usage Notes section with an interesting article sent by William Devlin. In the coming weeks, I hope to add more such notes or tips on the actual usage.

If you are a ShowSize customer and have some usage tips to share, you are welcome to send them to our support email address. We would be happy to post the article here for the benefit of all the users.

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.

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.

• Right click on the My Computer icon on desktop to see Properties.

• Select the Advanced page (or Advanced System Settings on Vista).

• Click on the “Environment Variables” button. It displays the Environment Variables as shown below.

  

• The variables that we want to change are TMP and TEMP in the User Variables.

  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/

I will attempt to explain why we had to discontinue the “Unused files report” on Windows Vista and why I advise not to use it even on earlier Windows systems now.

Vista breaks the “Unused Files” feature for NTFS:

On Vista, by default the “last access date” of the files are not updated on NTFS file systems. Microsoft did this to improve Vista performance on NTFS systems.

This means that the above information is useless for all the files on NTFS volumes. There is a registry tweak possible so that Vista starts updating the “last access date” of files. But even then the information won’t be useful for quite some time. For example, if you switch on this feature now you will have to wait for at least 30 days of use to get a report that shows files not used in last 30 days. Hence, it’s not a good solution as there is no way for ShowSize to determine when the tweak was made. In other words, one can never rely on Unused column or the Unused Files report. Besides this tweak might run into performance issues on Vista.

Corporate/LAN users, beware: Moreover, if many Vista systems are using files on a shared NTFS volume, some will update the last access date and some won’t depending on whether they were fixed with the registry tweak. So on a shared volume you can never be sure if the Unused Files report is useful at all.

THE HARD DECISION THAT WE MADE: Hence, it’s not possible to find a decent solution to this problem. We can at most give warning messages on Vista for NTFS volumes. But we can never be sure on shared volumes. Hence, in the newer ShowSize 5, we have entirely dropped this Unused Files report and the Used column in all the reports on Windows Vista.

This article is old. The new ShowSize 5 natively supports Windows Vista.

Important points about running ShowSize 4 on Vista:

• Note that we have a new version ShowSize 5, about to be released, that supports Vista officially. However, if you are trying to run ShowSize 4 on Vista, it might not run unless you fix a DEP setting as described in the following steps.
   
• You should not rely on the “Unused Files Report” or the Used Column in other reports as Windows Vista breaks this feature. There is no easy solution to this problem and hence, we have disabled this report in the new ShowSize 5 on Vista. Once again, if you run ShowSize 4 on Vista, DO NOT USE the unused files report.

Details of running ShowSize 4 on Windows Vista:
(In particular, please see the last point on Unused Files, marked in red)

Please look at the following information only if you want to run ShowSize 4 on Vista. Paid users can instead get the latest pre-release version 5 from the user support area.

1. Windows DEP settings on Vista:

   If you can’t run ShowSize at all (it stops immediately) then a DEP setting can fix it. This is explained in the following steps.

   1. Click on Start–Settings–Control Panel–System
   2. Click on Advanced page tab
   3. Click on the button Settings under Performance
   4. On the Performance Options that comes up, click on the Data Execution Prevention page tab
   5. If you want to know what DEP is, please click on “How does it work” link on that page.
   6. The default setting in XP used to be “Turn on DEP for essential programs and services only.” If that setting is already used, it won’t cause a problem with other software. However, if the second setting is selected, “Turn on DEP for all programs…” then that setting might cause problems with many applications like ShowSize.

   There can be two solutions:

   • Solution 1: Click on the first setting “Turn on DEP for essential programs and services only.” This will fix similar problems with all such applications which can’t run because of DEP setting.

   • Solution 2: Or, if you do want to use DEP and would prefer to keep the second setting, you must add selected programs to the Exceptions List below it. To add ShowSize to the exception list, please follow this procedure:
     • Click on Add button below the list.
     • Browse to the folder where ShowSize is installed. This is usually the folder, c:\program files\ShowSize…\ depending on which ShowSize version you are using.
     • Select the file showsize.exe or showsizepe.exe and click on Open.
     • Click on Apply.

     If the problem you are facing is related to DEP then the problem will go away.

2. ShowSize Help on Vista:
   If you can not see ShowSize help from the Help menu then your copy of Vista does not have the old format Windows Help. Here is the link to the to a page that gives more detils on how to fix this problem: WinHelp on Windows Vista

3. Error report on System Disk scans:
   On Windows Vista, if you scan the system disk with ShowSize, it will work fine except that it might give a list of errors showing which files it couldn’t access for getting the compressed size. This is normal. These files are locked by Windows and ShowSize can not get compressed sizes for them. In the next version, ShowSize will have an option to ignore these errors.

4. Installing ShowSize actions on the Explorer right-click menu:

   On Windows Vista, you need to run ShowSize as administrator to install the above menus (a Tools operation). After that, you can exit and run it as normal.

5. Vista breaks the “Unused Files” feature for NTFS:

   On Vista, by default the “last access date” of the files are not updated on NTFS file systems. Microsoft did this to improve Vista performance on NTFS systems.

   This means that the above information is useless for all the files on NTFS volumes. There is a registry tweak possible so that Vista starts updating the “last access date” of files. But even then the information won’t be useful for quite some time. For example, if you switch on this feature now you will have to wait for at least 30 days of use to get a report that shows files not used in last 30 days. Hence, it’s not a good solution as there is no way for ShowSize to determine when the tweak was made. In other words, one can never rely on Unused column or the Unused Files report. Besides this tweak might run into performance issues on Vista.

   Corporate/LAN users, beware: Moreover, if many Vista systems are using files on a shared NTFS volume, some will update the last access date and some won’t depending on whether they were fixed with the registry tweak. So on a shared volume you can never be sure if the Unused Files report is useful at all.

   THE HARD DECISION THAT WE MADE: Hence, it’s not possible to find a decent solution to this problem. We can at most give warning messages on Vista for NTFS volumes. But we can never be sure on shared volumes. Hence, in the newer ShowSize 5, we have entirely dropped this Unused Files report and the Used column in all the reports on Windows Vista.